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16 Joan Thomas
Joan Thomas set herself a very high bar with her first novel, Reading
by Lightning. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best
First Book, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, made the Globe Best 100 Books
list and was a finalist for both the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction
and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year. The Amazon jury called it “a
fabulous novel full of grace and discovery, haunted by the flavour of
memory and the prairies in World War Two.” Curiosity (McClelland
& Stewart), a work of historical fiction, appears set to rival its
estimable predecessor. It is set in the early 19th century in the English
seaside town of Lyme Regis and concerns the now famous palaeontologist
Mary Anning who at the age of 12 discovered a
200-million-year-old-skeleton.
Joan Thomas has been a long-time book reviewer for the Globe &
Mail and has contributed interview-based features to the Winnipeg
Free Press and Prairie Fire.
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