Overview:
No. 1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
OPRAH'S Book Club
WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH WRITERS PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK
Fall on Your Knees is set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James.
Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national bestseller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages. At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder.
At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sisters who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden; and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father. Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression.
The tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles , giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.
As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself The book’s epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey towards tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions. It is the unpredictability of this huge book that is its greatest joy, with allusions ranging from Hollywood stars to religious tracts. Fall on Your Knees simmers with vibrancy and crackling, effervescent, breathtaking language.
"This big, bold, epic shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oates in her Gothic period. ... It's a wild ride."--SANDRA SCOFIELD, CHICAGO TRIBUNE
"This resonant first novel ... [has] a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed."
--JOHN MOTYKA, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"In this mesmerizing book, Ann-Marie MacDonald stuns us with her graceful journey into the dark secrets of four generations of men and women. The breadth of MacDonald's vision is extraordinary. Magical, mythological in its scope, Fall on Your Knees transports us into a reality, at once horrifying and familiar, that we cannot bear to turn away from."
--Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country
"Fall on Your Knees proves that sisterhood is powerful--but not exactly as we thought it would be. It's a bit like performing the Stations of the Cross to rock 'n' roll."
--Rita Mae Brown, author of Rubyfruit Jungle and Riding Shotgun
"MacDonald's finest tool is her narrative voice, an intimate, companionable voice that makes of this novel a confidence whispered in a pillow. ... She has found the language of the heart. ... There is no resisting this story."
--Joan Thomas, Globe and Mail
"A magnificent novel ... [Fall on Your Knees] follows in the Victorian tradition of a big story widely told, a story of historical change in a community of crimes half-concealed inside a family's memories and of fearful secrets slowly unraveled."
--Philippa Gregory, The London Sunday Times
"With Fall on Your Knees, playwright MacDonald has taken a surprising leap into the front ranks of major Canadian novelists. ... Fall on Your Knees is a novel of tremendous appeal with a wonderful title, wonderful characters, and a story of such power that it lingers in the mind and continues to astonish long after the book has been put down. Eloquent, richly textured, and eminently readable."
--London Free Press
"A phenomenal novel ... these are the sorts of characters, both beautiful and ugly, who stay with you forever."
--Emma Perry, Time Out London
"With Fall on Your Knees, Ann-Marie MacDonald has woven a complex and fascinating story filled with entrancing, unforgettable characters. I am in awe of her work, which cuts to the bone of family relationships with a surgeon's expertise and a writer's depth of emotion."
--Lisa See, author of On Gold Mountain
"This gorgeously realized family saga shot to the top of Canada's bestseller list shortly after its release. It deserves no less attention in the U.s. market. Highly recommended."
--Library Journal
"A full-bodied, ever-rolling debut, the story of a talented Cape Breton family with more than its share of repression and tragedy ... an accomplished, considerably affecting saga."
--Kirkus Reviews
"A lyrical, complex, near-mythic debut novel ... remarkable. ... Most of all--beyond superb characterizations, an evocative sense of time and place, and divinely intricate plotting--MacDonald knows about the vagaries of love."
--Ruth Coughlin, Newsday
"Fevered ... a whomping achievement."
--Angie Jabine, The Oregonian
"A delicious story, one of those sweeping family sagas to take on summer vacations and savor. ... MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise. She has a dramatic touch that can elicit gasps from readers."
--Montreal Gazette
"Ambitious ... MacDonald's gallows humor serves as a warning to all those who expect a traditional historical epic--although she knows well how to balance the genre's conventions with dark wit."
--Nathalie op de Beeck, Out
"Brilliantly crafted ... profoundly and refreshingly different ... MacDonald has constructed a plot worthy of Victor Hugo, a novel that is like peeling an onion (not without tears) in its teasing revelations of truth. ... A standout."
--Vancouver Sun
"Stunning. ... The book and the talent behind it are big. The story is riveting, the characters achingly human, and the writing will take your breath away. ... [MacDonald] has leapt into the first rank of fiction writers."
--Toronto Star
"Magnetic ... a dizzying leap into a mind so rich and complex you spend almost as much time marveling how she got there as enjoying the results. ... Compelling and original ... MacDonald succeeds brilliantly in building a world that, at least for the satisfying length of time it take to finish Fall on Your Knees, gloriously supersedes all else."
--Financial Post
"Impressive. ... From the haunted first sentence [MacDonald] displays the assured touch of a skilled fiction writer."
--MacLean's
"At her brightest moments, when various cultures and voices clash and merge in a great rush of energetic prose, MacDonald nears Rushdie-like heights."
--RACHEL STOLL, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER AND CHRONICLE
"Fall on Your Knees does not disappoint; this is an ambitiously big story --refreshingly old-fashioned in its wide scope, the sheer number of central characters, and the tale's own epiclike complexity."
--LIESEL LITZENBURGER,
DETROIT NEWSSTCOMFREEPRESS
"This richly layered tale of the secrets within several generations of a Canadian family is both feverishly intense and darkly humorous."
--DAILY VARIETY
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
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