Catherine Gildiner and Judy Fong Bates

JUDY FONG BATES

THE YEAR OF FINDING MEMORY is an elegant and surprising book about a Chinese family's difficult arrival in Canada, and a daughter's search to understand remarkable and terrible truths about her parents' past lives.

 Growing up in her father's hand laundry in small town Ontario, Judy Fong Bates listened to stories of her parents' past lives in China, a place far removed from their every-day life of poverty and misery. But in spite of the allure of these stories, Fong Bates longed to be a Canadian girl. Fifty years later she finally followed her curiosity back to her ancestral home in China for a reunion that spiralled into a series of unanticipated discoveries. Opening with a shock The Year of Finding Memory explores a particular, yet universal, world of family secrets, love, loss, courage and shame. This is a memoir of a daughter's emotional journey, and her painful acceptance of conflicting truths. In telling the story of her parents, Fong Bates is telling the story of how she came to know them, of finding memory.


JUDY FONG BATES is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection China Dog and other Tales from a Chinese Laundry, and the novel Midnight at the Dragon Café, which was the 2007 Everybody Reads selection of Portland, Oregon, and an American Library Association Notable Book for 2006.

CATHERINE GILDINER - AFTER THE FALLS

CATHERINE GILDINER recounts her remarkable coming-of-age in the 1960s with the same wit, candour and exhilarating storytelling that has made Too Close to the Falls a modern classic.

 When Cathy McClure is thirteen years old, her parents make the bold decision to move to suburban Buffalo in hopes that it will help Cathy focus on her studies and stay out of trouble. But “normal” has never been Cathy’s forte, and leaving Niagara Falls and Catholic school behind does nothing to quell her spirited nature. As the 1960s dramatically unfold, Cathy takes on many personas — cheerleader, vandal, HoJo hostess, civil rights demonstrator — with the same gusto she exhibited as a child working split shifts in her father’s pharmacy. But when tragedy strikes, it is her role as daughter that proves to be most challenging.

CATHERINE GILDINER published her first book in 1999, a humorous memoir of her childhood called Too Close to the Falls. The story is told through the eyes of the young Cathy who, at the age of four, is put to work assisting the delivery man who works for her father’s pharmacy – and other “crazy” stories from her “normal” childhood. The memoir was published in Canada, the United States, England and Australia to wide acclaim, received award nominations and spent more than 70 weeks on Canadian bestseller lists.