Tiny Lights for Travellers

By Naomi K. Lewis

Governor General’s Award Finalist: A “wry, moving” memoir of a woman retracing her grandfather’s escape from Amsterdam during the Holocaust (Alison Pick, Booker-nominated author of Between Gods).

Why couldn’t I occupy the world as those model-looking women did, with their flowing hair, pulling their tiny bright suitcases as if to say, I just arrived from elsewhere, and I already belong here, and this sidewalk belongs to me?

When her marriage suddenly ends, and a diary documenting her beloved Opa’s escape from the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in the summer of 1942 is discovered, Naomi Lewis decides to retrace his route to freedom. Travelling alone from Amsterdam to Lyon, she discovers family secrets and her own narrative as a second-generation Jewish Canadian.

With vulnerability, humour, and wisdom, Lewis’s memoir of her journey, interspersed with excerpts from her grandfather’s diary, asks tough questions about her identity as a secular Jew, the accuracy of family stories, and the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781772124750

Naomi K. Lewis

Naomi K. Lewis was born in England, lived in Washington DC, and grew up in Ottawa. Her stories have been published in the Fiddlehead, the New Quarterly, the Antigonish Review, Prairie Fire, and Grain. "The Guiding Light," a chapter of the novel that began as a story, won the Fiddlehead Fiction Prize in 2007. Lewis now lives in Edmonton. Cricket in a Fist is her first book-length work of fiction.