Sheldon Kennedy

James Grainger

In 1996, Sheldon Kennedy rocked the insular world of Canadian hockey by announcing that his former minor-league coach, Graham James -- the Hockey News 1989 Man of the Year -- had sexually abused him more than 300 times. The media portrayed Kennedy as a hero for breaking the code of silence in professional hockey and bringing James to justice. The heroic myth intensified in 1998 when Kennedy announced that he was going to in-line skate from Newfoundland to British Columbia to raise awareness of sexual abuse. The skate raised over $1 million for Canadian Red Cross sexual abuse programs, and Kennedy settled in Calgary with his wife and young daughter. Anyone who has followed hockey in the last ten years is familiar with the story of ex-NHL player Sheldon Kennedy. As one of the most promising hockey talents to emerge from the Canadian minor leagues in the last two decades, Kennedy was destined for hockey greatness. But after he was drafted by the Detroit Red Wings in 1988, he attracted more attention for his off-ice antics than for his contributions to the score sheet. Plagued by rumours of drug and alcohol abuse and a string of injuries, Kennedy drifted from team to team. The happy ending promised by the headlines never materialized. Still haunted by the demons of sexual abuse, Kennedy's life spiralled out of control. Now he has finally come forward to tell his story, and the story of coach Graham James, who is out of prison and currently coaching hockey in Europe.

Why I Didn't Say Anything

John Gilmore

First published in 1764, The Sugar-Cane is a major work in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature. It is the only poem written in the Caribbean before the Twentieth Century to achieve a place in the Western 'canon'. Grainger sought to interpret his personal experience of the Caribbean through his wide and deep reading in literature, from the Greeks to Milton. Grainger wrote a 'West India Georgic', challenging assumptions about poetic diction and the proper subject matter of poetry, and boldly asserting the importance of the Caribbean to the Eighteenth Century British empire.. This is the first reliable text and critical study of the poem, setting it within the context of Grainger's life and work.

A Study of James Grainger's The Sugar Cane

The Poetics of Empire

Set over the course of a single day and night, Harmless is a tense, provocative, and psychologically astute first novel in the tradition of Herman Koch's The Dinner, Tom Perrotta's Little Children, and Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, about a weekend reunion of old friends that takes a terrifying turn when two teenage girls go missing. At a remote farm, a group of old friends gather to catch up, sit by the fire, and forget about their overworked lives. But a long weekend in the country is not Joseph's idea of a good time -- not when he's promised his ex-wife he'll use the occasion to talk to their troubled fourteen-year-old daughter, and not when the farm belongs to his former lover and her husband, Alex. Once best friends, Joseph and Alex are now estranged, with much left unspoken between them. As more guests arrive and the reunion unfolds, old rivalries, new pressures, and erotic tensions surface. But things take a terrifying turn when the adults return from a nostalgic drug-fuelled bender at sundown to discover their two teenage daughters are missing. As night descends and the girls remain unfound, Joseph and Alex decide to enter the surrounding woods together in search of their daughters. What the two men encounter in the wilderness will push them to confront how far they are willing to go to protect the ones they love. By turns blackly comic, thought-provoking, and harrowing, Harmless introduces James Grainger as an unflinching observer of the way we live now, and exposes the dark impulses we conceal beneath the veneer of our modern lives.

James Grainger

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