Historical Fiction Books

Book Synopsis Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor's family in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Depression. Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic and alcoholic wife, Cammy, and their two children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences, happily wears Cammy's expensive cast off clothes, and is transformed from an innocent into a chic urban beauty. When Lexi is called home to Saskatchewan to care for her dying mother, she returns a changed person. At home, Lexi finds a journal written by her older brother during the family's journey from Russia to Canada. In it she reads of a tragedy kept secret for years, one hat reconciles her early memories of her mother as joyful and loving with the burdened woman she became in Canada. Lexi returns to Waterloo, where a crisis of her own, coupled with the knowledge of this secret, serves as the catalyst for her realization that, unlike her mother, she must create her own destiny. Watermelon Syrup is a classic bildungsroman: the tale of a naive young woman at the crossroads of a traditional, restrictive world and a modern one with its freedom, risks, and responsibilities. Trade Review``Part of the `Life Writing Series,' published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press ... this is a fictionalized version of Jacobsen's mother's life story based on extensive oral history, family journals, and historical research. Just before she died of cancer in 2005, Annie Jacobsen finished a third draft of the novel and turned it over to her friend and colleague Jane Finlay-Young for revision. Finlay-Young took the novel through two more drafts with assistance from Di Brandt. The product of this collaboration is a poignant story told in beautifully evocative language (at times reminiscent of Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces) with a powerful sense of local history.'' -- Linda Quirk -- Canadian Literature, 200, Spring 2009, 200810``The many voices in this collaborative effort help define the singular voice of Lexi, her self-determination and discovery, and allow for a satisfying, multilayered read. It is a solid and cohesive piece of writing.'' -- Maggie Mortimer -- The Globe and Mail, October 13, 2007, 200710``Within a few pages I found myself swept into Lexi's life, and until the novel's close, I never left her side, so attached that I too experienced the pain and glory of the new world she entered as a young woman hired as some `home help.' When she/we had to return to the family farm, I thought my heart would break--but I kept on reading and she/we survived the grief of loss and emerged whole and strong. Watermelon Syrup is a wonderful novel of leaving, of discovery, of finding one's true self and of learning about love. Annie Jacobsen was a wise and beautiful woman and she has left us a wise and beautiful book.'' -- Isabel Huggan, award-winning author of Belonging: Home Away from Home -- 200708``Watermelon Syrup is the story of a young Mennonite girl from Saskatchewan who travels to southern Ontario to obtain work during the Depression years. Much of the story is actually a fictionalized account of Annie's own family and is based on stories she had heard about her mother's childhood in Russia and Saskatchewan. Annie died of cancer in 2005, after completing the third draft of this novel. Her friend Jane Finlay-Young and award-winning author Di Brandt took the story through two more drafts, polishing and revising, though, as Finlay-Young says: `the manuscript was already whole, had already found its voice and the story was already fully developed.'... Together they have created a fine, multi-layered story that readers will surely enjoy.... Watermelon Syrup is well worth a trip to the bookstore or library.'' -- Donna Gamache -- Prairie Fire Magazine, July 2008, 200807

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Book SynopsisThe University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, 1997In this, the first Nubian novel ever translated, Awad Shalali, a Nubian worker in modern Egypt, dreams of Dongola—the capital of medieval Nubia, now lost to the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam. In Dongola, the Nubians reached their zenith. They defeated and dominated Upper Egypt, and their archers, deadly accurate in battle, were renowned as “the bowman of the glance.Helima, Awad’s wife, must deal with the reality of today’s Nubia, a poverty-stricken bottomland. Men like Awad now work in Cairo for good wages while the women remain at home in squalor, dominated by the Islam of their conquerors and ignorant of the glory now covered by the Nile’s water. Left to tend Awad’s sick mother and his dying country, Halima grows despondent and learns the truths behind the Upper Egyptian lyric: “Time, you are a traitor—what have you done with my love?Through his characters’ pain and suffering, Idris Ali paints in vibrant detail, with wit and a keen sense of history’s absurdities, the story of cultures and hearts divided, of lost lands, impossible dreams, and abandoned lives.

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