Katherine Govier

A lost voice of old Japan reclaims her rightful place inhistory in this breathtaking work of imagination and scholarship from award-winning and internationally acclaimedauthor Katherine Govier. In the evocative taleof 19th century Tokyo, The Printmaker’sDaughter delivers an enthrallingtale of one of the world’s great unknown artists: Oei,the mysterious daughter of master printmaker Hokusai, painter of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji. In a novel that willresonate with readers of Tracy Chevalier’s Girlwith a Pearl Earring, Lisa See’s SnowFlower and the Secret Fan, and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,the sights and sensations of an exotic, bygone era form the richly captivatingbackdrop for an intimate, finely wrought story of daughterhood and duty, artand authorship, the immortality of creation and the anonymity of history.

A Novel

The Printmaker's Daughter

a novel

The printmaker's daughter

A literary saga, spanning two generations and two cultures, Canadian and Japanese, reminiscent in writing style and appeal to the work of Isabel Allende. care of her grandfather, who spends long periods away at sea, leaving her alone back in Vancouver. When she reaches her teens, Vera is taken by her grandfather's mistress to a small island in Japan. The women of the island take her in and she learns to dive for pearls. Immersed in her surroundings, she meets a mysterious stranger, a man who is trained as a ceremonial sword polisher, who brings her into touch with the outside world. Every day, they listen to the mounting rhetoric on the radio and must live with the knowledge of the havoc that the Japanese are wreaking in China. she has long thought is dead. World War Two breaks out. The idyll is over. identity. to Japan, to the one place that she truly belonged.

Three Views of Crystal Water

Angel Walk

Between Men

Before and After

Oei is the daughter of the great Japanese printmaker Hokusai. Long consigned to a minor role as gloomy sidekick, she is barely a footnote in the historical record. Here, Oei recounts her life with one of the great eccentrics of the 19th century. Dodging the Shogun’s spies, she and Hokusai live amongst actors, novelists, tattoo artists and prostitutes, making the exquisite pictures that define their time. Disguised, they escape the city gates to view waves and Mount Fuji. But they return to enchanting, dangerous Edo (Tokyo), the largest city in the world. Wielding her brush, Oei defies all expectations of womanhood—all but one. She is dutiful until death to the exasperating father who created her and, ultimately, steals her future. A breathtaking work of imagination, The Ghost Brush illuminates the most tender and ambiguous love of all—that between father and daughter.

The Ghost Brush

In this eclectic and intriguing collection of short stories, Govier blurs the boundaries between seemingly disparate worlds and highlights the human desire to rationalize life experiences. Two cottagers mistake the brilliance of a search party's flares for an alien invasion. A photographer rewrites the past to suit the present by altering his client's photographs. The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery is extraordinary and absorbing fiction, with ideas that resonate in the mind.

The Immaculate Conception Photography Gallery

“In a life so well-documented, these next few months form a rare gap. It is as if the dark cloud and fog Audubon sails into transcends mere weather, and becomes a state of mind. As if Labrador itself (or its weather) swallows the story.” His need to capture the fugitive colours of birds pushed John James Audubon into impossible places, none more dangerous than the fog-ridden coast of Labrador in the summer of 1833. In mesmerizing prose, novelist Katherine Govier explores this fateful summer in the life of a man as untamed as his subjects. Running two steps ahead of the bailiff, alternately praised and reviled by critics, John James Audubon set himself the audacious task of drawing, from nature, every bird in North America. The result was his masterpiece, The Birds of America, which he and his family published and sold to subscribers on both sides of the Atlantic. In June 1833, he enlisted his son and a party of young gentlemen to set sail for nesting grounds no ornithologist had ever seen, in the treacherous passage between Newfoundland and Labrador. Fogbound at Little Natashquan, he encounters Captain Henry Wolsey Bayfield of the Royal Navy, whose mission is to chart the labyrinthine coast to make it safe for sea traffic. Bayfield is an exacting and duty-bound aristocrat; the charismatic Audubon spins tales to disguise his dubious parentage and lack of training. Bayfield is a confirmed bachelor; Audubon is a married man in love with his young assistant. But the captain becomes the artist’s foil and his measuring stick, his judge and, oddly, the recipient of his long-held secrets. In this atmospheric and enthralling novel, Katherine Govier recreates the summer in which “the world’s greatest living bird artist” finally understood the paradox embedded in his art: that the act of creation was also an act of destruction.

Creation

Presents real-life adventure stories by such noted women writers as Margaret Atwood, Clare Boylan, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Janice Kulyk Keefer

Contemporary Women's Travel Adventures

Without a Guide

At eighty-five, Cory Ditchburn has finally agreed to a retrospective of her art. For years she had refused, afraid that any summing up of her life's work would mean she'd never work again. But now vanity has won out - vanity and the need to see it all one more time. As she sorts through her photographs with Tyke, the son she abandoned for her lover and for World War II, each image projects Cory into one of the split-seconds that have strung themselves together as her life. Her pictures give her back the story of her past - from her beginnings in Pointe au Baril, Ontario, a place of rocky islands and forests; to her days in London, England, where she honed her skills as a photographer and met the great love of her life; to war-ravaged Europe where she worked as a war correspondent for Lord Beaverbrook, travelling with the ranks of soldiers, earning fame as "the girl photographer"; to her self-imposed exile at a fishing cabin in Safe Harbour. Together, Cory and Tyke retrace the dramatic and sometimes painful path that has led them to the present. Mother and son reclaim each other, and relive an extraordinary woman's life.

A landmark novel of the Canadian West from one of Canada’s most accomplished writers, author of The Ghost Brush and Fables of Brunswick Avenue It is 1911, and the coming of the railroad to the Canadian Rockies brings a parade of newcomers to the Bow Valley—coal miners, scientists, runaway aristocrats and remittance men. Among them is poacher Herbie Wishart. Herbie reinvents himself as a trail guide in the town of Gateway and becomes an outfitter for a fossil-hunting expedition headed by a prominent American archaeologist. Rumour has it that the secrecy-shrouded Hodgson expedition could overturn all previous knowledge about early life forms. Along for the trip are Hodgson’s adult children, mopey Humphrey and the captivating Isabel, with whom Herbie strikes up a campside alliance. But when an early snowstorm hits and trailside grudges come to a head, the expedition mysteriously disappears. The tragedy threatens to stain the Rocky Mountain park’s reputation just as its newly elected government overseers begin to sell the pristine Canadian wilderness to the world. Despite all efforts from that year on to solve, or bury, the mystery, the disappearance will haunt Gateway, and define the futures of Herbie Wishart and his stubbornly female descendants. The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel is at once sweeping and intimate, bursting with heart, wit and larger-than-life characters whose sheer brio rivals the dazzling and dangerous Rocky Mountains. Katherine Govier proves she is one of Canada’s master storytellers with this groundbreaking portrait of western Canada’s past.

The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel

Hearts of Flame

Fiica lui Hokusai

A landmark novel of the Canadian West from one of Canada’s most accomplished writers, author of The Ghost Brush and Fables of Brunswick Avenue Gateway, Alberta, 1911. The coming of the railroad to the Canadian Rockies has brought a parade of newcomers to the heavenly Bow Valley—climbers, coal miners, artists, scientists, runaway aristocrats and remittance men. Among the latter is the poacher Herbie Wishart, who arrived on a one-way ticket and has reinvented himself as a trail guide and teller of tall tales. Herbie becomes outfitter for a fossil-hunting expedition headed by a prominent Washington, D.C., archaeologist. Rumours say that the findings of the secrecy-shrouded Hodgson expedition, as it comes to be known, could overturn all previous knowledge about early life forms. Brought along to help in the quarry for the summer are Hodgson’s adult children, mopey Humphrey and the captivating Isabel, with whom Herbie strikes up a campside alliance. But when an early snowstorm hits and trailside grudges come to a head, the expedition mysteriously disappears. The tragedy threatens to stain the Rocky Mountain park’s reputation just as its newly elected government overseers begin to sell the pristine Canadian wilderness to the world. Despite all efforts from that year on to solve, or bury, the mystery, the disappearance will haunt Gateway, and define the futures of Herbie Wishart and his stubbornly female descendants. The Three Sisters Hotel is at once sweeping and intimate, and bursting with heart, wit and larger-than-life characters who rival the Rocky Mountain landscape for sheer brio. Katherine Govier proves she is one of Canada’s master storytellers with this new novel, which is a groundbreaking portrait of Western Canada’s past, with all its contradictions and complexities, an intimate story of romance and family, and a tantalizing historical—and prehistorical—mystery. PRAISE FOR THE GHOST BRUSH “Lavishly researched and brilliant. . . . Govier astonishes throughout in her ability to write epic themes intimately. . . . Lyrical, absorbing, and intense.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (STARRED REVIEW)

Katherine Govier

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