Showing results by narrator "Gwenlyn Cumyn" in All Categories

So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, and in fruitless pursuit of the next, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a cold, cruel stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence.

Half a world away from her home in Manitoulin Island, Ethel Mulvany is starving in Singapore’s infamous Changi Prison, along with hundreds of other women jailed there as POWs during the Second World War. They beat back pangs of hunger by playing decadent games of make-believe and writing down recipes filled with cream, raisins, chocolate, butter, cinnamon, ripe fruit - the unattainable ingredients of peacetime, of home, of memory. In this novelistic, immersive biography, Suzanne Evans presents a truly individual account of WWII through the eyes of Ethel.