Reproduction
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
An internationally bestselling debut novel: an energetically told, funny and moving book about how strangers become family.
Reproduction tells a crooked love story which takes strange, winding paths shaped by community, family and fleeting interactions that leave an inedible imprint.
Felicia, a nineteen-year-old West Indian student, and Edgar, an impetuous heir of a wealthy German family, meet when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital room. An odd-couple relationship blooms between Edgar and Felicia, ripe with miscommunications and reprisals for perceived and real offences that have some unexpected results.
Fast-forward, their son Armistice is a teenager fixated on a variety of get-rich-quick schemes that are as comic as they are indicative of the immigrant son's fear of falling through the cracks. When Edgar re-enters Felicia's life at a typically inopportune moment, the book's exhilarating final act is set in the motion and Reproduction is revealed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams's inventive, Giller-winning debut novel (after the collection Not Anyone's Anything) explores the roots of Canada's home care program for migrants. In the late 1970s, Felicia Shaw, 19, and her mother live in Brampton, Ontario, having recently arrived from a "small unrecognized island" in the West Indies. Her mother suffers from a heart condition and winds up in a hospital in Toronto. Felicia forms an unlikely bond with middle-aged Edgar Gross, whose mother shares her mother's hospital room. After Felicia's mother dies, Edgar persuades her to move in with him, and their uneasy relationship is further complicated after Edgar gets Felicia pregnant and kicks her out of the house. Williams jumps through the years in short, indelible bursts of dialogue between Felicia and her son, Armistice ("Army"), and in chapters titled "XX" or "XY" after the sex chromosomes. At 14, Army develops a crush on his landlord's teenaged daughter, Heather. After Heather becomes pregnant, she confides to Army that she was raped, while Felicia compares Heather's plight to her own experience of teen pregnancy and hopes Army will break from the cycle. While the dizzying shuffle of voices and complicated structure occasionally overtax the reader, Williams's unsparing view on the past's repetition is heartrending. This ambitious experiment yields worthwhile results.
