6 p.m.-7:30 p.m.
Henry F. Hall Building., H-1220 1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W., 12th floor Montreal
About Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn:
In a small town in the south east of Ireland in the 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. So when a job is offered in America, it is clear that she must go. Leaving her family and home, Eilis sets off to forge a new life for herself in Brooklyn.
Young, homesick and alone, she gradually buries the pain of parting beneath the rhythms of a new life--days at the till in a large department store, night classes in Brooklyn College and Friday evenings on the dance floor of the parish hall--until she realizes that she has found a sort of happiness.
But when tragic news summons her back to Ireland and the constrictions of her old life unexpectedly give way to new possibilities, she finds herself facing a terrible choice between love and happiness in the land where she belongs and the promises she must keep on the far side of the ocean.
Brooklyn is a tender story of great love and loss, and of the heartbreaking choice between personal freedom and duty. In the character of Eilis, Colm Tóibín has created a remarkable heroine, and in Brooklyn, a novel of devastating emotional power.
Stephanie King, PhD, Faculty Lecturer in the Department of English at McGill University, will lead the discussion.
Cost: $5 | Light refreshments will be served.
RSVP by April 15, 2010, online or call 1-888-777-3330.
Stephanie King
Stephanie King, PhD, teaches in the Department of English at McGill University and has previously taught at Concordia University. She earned her MA at Concordia in 2001 and obtained her PhD from McGill in 2007.
Her dissertation, entitled "Devious, Dashing, Disturbing: Fallen Men in Victorian Fiction, 1860-1900," questions Victorian conventions of narrative and gender by introducing the character of the fallen man as an identifiable 19th-century persona.
Dr. King has published her work in the Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies journal, the McFarland British Gothic and Sensation Fiction anthology and the Broadview Instructor's Guide. Besides writing and teaching, Dr. King has been a book club reviewer since 2001. She enjoys the lively discussions and intelligent participants at Concordia Alumni Book Club meetings.
