Heave

By Christy Ann Conlin

Bursting with wonder and delicate despair, Serrie Sullivan longs for the world, but she’s trapped, just like Dorothy in Oz. Serrie’s got a nasty secret. It’s festering inside her, because in the gothic Annapolis Valley, hey, that’s what you do — you never show and you never, ever tell.

As she dashes from her wedding altar on the run of her life, ardently wanting to understand what has brought her to this moment, Serrie sweeps us up in an exhilarating and poignant journey from rural Nova Scotia to London bars, to strip clubs by the docks, through mental hospital wards and rehab centres, back to quiet verandahs and porch swings in serene Lupin Cove. Along the way we meet a delightful array of off-beat characters including Serrie’s best friends, Dearie and Elizabeth: Dearie, the anglicized Acadian who wants to go to New Orleans to find her Cajun relatives, and Elizabeth, who would like nothing better than to spend the rest of her life picking strawberries.

Heave explores the joys and agonies of family, of what one generation inherits from the next, and of how past and present are inexorably linked. Memories weave through the book as Serrie searches for equanimity in a life that intoxicates her with its beauty as it knocks her to her knees.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9780385673686

Christy Ann Conlin

CHRISTY ANN CONLIN is the author of two acclaimed novels, Heave and The Memento. She is also the author of the short-fiction collection Watermark, which was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. Heave was a national bestseller, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Dartmouth Book Award. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Geist, Room, and Numéro Cinq. Her short fiction has also been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the American Short Fiction Prize. Her radio broadcast work includes co-creating and hosting CBC Fear Itself, a national summer radio series. Christy Ann studied theatre at the University of Ottawa and screenplay writing at the University of British Columbia. She was born and raised in seaside Nova Scotia, where she still resides.

Reviews for Heave

[reluctantm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book made me homesick for Nova Scotia so badly. Conlin captures the valley and Halifax so well, the characters using just the right amount of Nova Scotia vernacular to make it believable without becoming caricatured. The story is slow to start off and quite dense for the first few pages. Characters are sometimes thrown in with formal introductions being made a hundred pages later (like Gordie). But the story really starts to take off somewhere around page forty, where if the reader has persevered through what seems to be impenetrable stream-of-consciousness drunken ramblings, you are treated to an engaging picture of life on the east coast.The ending, however, much like the beginning, is unsatisfying. The last ten pages or so feel rushed and so much happens so quickly that it is disappointing to get so far only to have so much fall apart with what it seems to be a mad dash to the finish, leaving as much emotional carnage in its wake as possible.

[piefuchs · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

To smart to be stuck there, drug addict in the Maritimes, that has some problems with her family. Another day in paradise. Not bad.