Catherine Bush

For those who loved Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviorcomes a new climate-themed, Shakespeare-inspired novel from bestselling author Catherine Bush. The time is now or an alternate near now, the world close to our own. A mammoth Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America, leaving devastation in its wake, its outer wings brushing over tiny Blaze Island in the North Atlantic. Just as the storm disrupts the present, it stirs up the past: Miranda's memories of growing up in an isolated, wind-swept cove and the events of long ago that her father will not allow her to speak of. In the aftermath of the storm, she finds herself in a world altered so quickly and so radically that she hardly knows what has happened. As Miranda says, change is clear after it happens.

Blaze Island

What happens when your astronaut mother orbits the earth and your father rushes around the world on disaster relief missions? You can always join a terrorist animal rights group and chat with your mother via satellite. 20-year-old Helen, who watched a stand-in family take her and her brother's place when they skipped their mother's liftoff, is plagued by cynicism and doubt, yet she longs for direction. Her envisioning of, and growth into adult life is chronicled in Catherine Bush's ultra-contemporary tale Minus Time.

Minus Time

Selected as an Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013, a Canada Reads Top 40 Pick, and a NOW Magazine Book of the Year While in Copenhagen, Sara Wheeler, a Toronto journalist, happens upon Cirkus Mirak, a touring Ethiopian children's circus. She later meets and is convinced to drive the circus founder, Raymond Renaud, through the night from Toronto to Montreal. Such chance beginnings lead to later fateful encounters, as renowned novelist Catherine Bush artfully confronts the destructive power of allegations. With Accusation, Bush again proves herself one of Canada's finest authors as she examines the impossibility inherent in attempting to uncover "the truth." After a friend of Sara's begins work on a documentary about the circus, unsettling charges begin to float to the surface, disturbing tales of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of Raymond. Accounts and anecdotes mount, denunciations fly, and while Sara tries to untangle the narrative knots and determine what to believe, the concept of a singular (truth) becomes slippery. Her present search is simultaneously haunted by her past. Moving between Canada, Ethiopia, and Australia, Accusationfollows a network of lives that intersect with life-altering consequence, painfully revealing that the best of intentions can still lead to disaster, yet from disaster spring seeds of renewal and hope.

A Novel

Accusation

A gripping novel of love and war, risk and responsibility Arcadia Hearne is a war researcher, specializing in military intervention. But her immersion in contemporary war is offset by her refusal to put herself at risk, and by her insistence on keeping her past at bay. Ten years earlier, in the mid-1980s, Arcadia had fled Toronto for London after two university students--rivals for her love--fought a pistol duel over her. Now, through the interventions of her sister, Lux, and her increasingly complicated relationship with a new lover, Amir, who has secrets of his own, Arcadia is forced to confront what really happened on the day of the duel. Moving from the verdant ravines of Toronto to the secret canals of a gritty, vibrant London, The Rules of Engagement has an extraordinary sense of time and place. A powerful exploration of the nature of love, the novel provocatively explores the crossing of emotional, ethical, and literal borders.

The Rules of Engagement

Widely praised by critics in Canada and the U.S., shortlisted for the 1994 SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and a City of Toronto Book Award, Minus Time made a stunningly successful publishing debut. Now with the February 2000 release of Catherine Bush’s second novel, The Rules of Engagement (see page 9), and interest from the film community, this is the perfect time for the new PerennialCanada edition of Minus Time. With surreal lyricism and edgy, deadpan wit, Catherine Bush’s Minus Time traces the desire of a young woman to make a place for herself in a media-mad, toxic-scare-filled world. Helen’s mother is an astronaut trying to set an endurance record in a space station. Her father, a disaster-relief specialist, circles the world saving people from catastrophe. What kind of family is possible when your parents are in constant motion and there’s so much space separating you from them? With risks of disaster all around, how do you dream a future for yourself? Set in a world where external events aptly mirror the drama of personal relationships, Minus Time offers up a brilliantly observed, deeply moving tale of millennial life, in a voice sliced through with irony and awe.

Catherine Bush

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