Reproduction
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"With subtlety and wit, [a] prizewinning debut" novel set in 1970s Toronto "explores a liaison across race and class divisions in Canada" (The Guardian, UK).
Felicia and Edgar come from different worlds. She's a nineteen-year-old student and Caribbean immigrant while he is the impetuous heir to his German family's fortune. When their ailing mothers are assigned the same Toronto hospital room, their chance encounter leads to an unlikely relationship full miscommunications, misunderstandings, and very surprising results.
Years later, Felicia's son Armistice—"Army" for short—is a teenager fixated on get-rich-quick schemes, each one more absurd than the next. The. Edgar finally re-enters Felicia's life, at yet another inopportune moment, putting this "witty, playful and disarmingly offbeat" saga on the path to its heartfelt conclusion (The Toronto Star, CA).
Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
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.
