19 New Voices
with host Sheryl MacKay
Janet Romain
Janet Romain is a Vancouver-born Métis Canadian. She has lived most of her life in Northern BC where she has worked at everything from short
order cooking and lumber grading to cattle ranching, which she currently does with her husband near Fort Fraser, BC. She can now add “published novelist” to her lengthy
resumé.
Her first novel, praised by Richard Van Camp as “a marvel to read and an instant classic,” is Grandpère. It is the story of a 98-year-old elder
of the Carrier Nation, his widowed granddaughter who looks after him and is documenting his stories, and her 13-year-old granddaughter who turns up on
their doorstep seeking refuge from a life of neglect and abuse in the big city. It is a gentle story in which tragedy and loss are ultimately resolved in hope.
Gurjinder Basran
Gurjinder Basran has told a mother/daughter story. Hers is a work of fiction in the form of
an exceptional first novel. Everything Was Good-Bye is a classic story of the cultural tug-of-war between
first generation immigrants to Canada and their second-generation offspring. The children often live in a cultural hinterland, not quite comfortable in either of
their two worlds. In this instance a young Indo-Canadian woman being raised by her widowed mother struggles to break free
from the constraints and behavioural expectations of her traditional Punjabi community. Basran’s straightforward writing evokes a strong sense of
that cultural claustrophobia. Everything Was Good-Bye was the winner of last year’s “Search for the Great BC Novel.”
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