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Fall on Your Knees
- Narrated by: Ann-Marie MacDonald
- Length: 18 hrs and 42 mins
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Publisher's Summary
“What a wild ride - I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced Fall on Your Knees as her February 2002 Book Club selection. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful, and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national best seller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.
At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the center of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters - beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden; and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite - forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father.
Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, “giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed” (The New York Times Book Review). As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself.
The book’s epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey toward tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism, and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions.
The Sunday Times wrote, “It is the unpredictability of this huge book that is its greatest joy.” With allusions ranging from Hollywood stars to religious tracts, Fall on Your Knees simmers with vibrancy and crackling, effervescent, breathtaking language.
What the critics say
"Magnetic…a dizzying leap into a mind so rich and complex you spend almost as much time marveling how she got there as enjoying the results.... Compelling and original…MacDonald succeeds brilliantly in building a world that, at least for the satisfying length of time it takes to finish Fall on Your Knees, gloriously supersedes all else." (Financial Post)
"Beautiful…this big, bold, epic shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oates. It is history told with a thumping, complex narrative…a host of colourful characters and a great big bow to psychology.... Fall on Your Knees is the work of a big talent. It's a wild ride." (Chicago Tribune)
"Some wonderful writing has come out of Canada in recent years from such authors as Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood. Now they are joined by the multi-talented Ann-Marie MacDonald.... She is already a successful actress and playwright. It seems almost unfair that she should have written a brilliant first novel." (Sunday Telegraph)
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What listeners say about Fall on Your Knees
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- CKH Vancouver
- 2022-09-17
Canadian Gothic
Family Saga/Canadian Gothic. Stunning book, so very interestingly written. Beautiful prose. Some of the story is wonderful and loving, and some of it is truly horrible, of which you get hints all the way through.
Narration was amazing, (performative in parts)
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jeff Surtees
- 2023-08-12
One of the best
I have often told people the the paper version of Fall on Your Knees is among the best books I have read. Now I can add that it is also among the best books I have ever listened to. Ms Macdonald is amazing.
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- Sarah Kern
- 2023-02-09
Incredible
The story of these characters was so tragic and so beautiful. I felt so deeply connected to each one. This book had been on my list for a long time and I am so glad I finally went for it!
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- Bookeater
- 2023-03-22
Exceptional story weaving
Truly the most intricate and well layed out novels I've ever experienced. Although the material was quite dark in content and hard to imagine without feeling a bit sick at times, it was so real and the characters so alive. Look forward to more from this author.
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- Patricia Arcuri
- 2023-09-29
Great Book
One of the best books I’ve listened to in a long time .. I loved each and ever character the story kept me interested right til the very end.. it was also neat that it takes place in Cape Breton Island where my grandfather was from he was born in Mabou
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- Leanne MacKay
- 2023-04-27
Amazing storyteller
We’ve listened to all her books and lm so proud to say she is Canadian. She’s a natural and l want to listen to more!
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1 person found this helpful
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- tiffani mcbee
- 2022-12-16
Excellent book
This may be one of my new favourite books. I love the author as the narrator, and the story itself is hard to step away from. I couldn’t stop listening.
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- Marika Gale
- 2023-01-13
Wonderful
Anne Marie Macdonald is an astonishing good reader - her performance of her own story is perfect. I loved this book when I read the hardcover years ago, and I loved it just as much as an audiobook.
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- Joseph H. Clarke
- 2023-01-19
Capturing
I heard a lot about the book over the years and most of what I heard made me reluctant to spend time with it. It is disturbing, challenging and yet incredibly gripping. So engrossed was I with the characters that I felt a sadness when it ended.
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- Happy Customer
- 2023-07-05
So Good!
The least predictable book ever. Every time I thought I knew what was going to happen, I was shocked. Loved that!
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