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Coventry
By: Helen Humphreys
2008, 177 p.
 
Harriet is sure she can smell the books burning in the library. She thinks she can smell the pages turning to ash, all the pages she has poured through, the paper thick and slightly damp, the edges of the pages brown with foxing and sometimes sticky to the touch.
On November 14, 1940, a full moon, a bomber’s moon, illuminates the city of Coventry. Harriet Marsh, a middle-aged widow and fire-warden, looks over the city from the roof of its mediaeval cathedral, as she stands watch with the young Jeremy Fisher. This night will bring the worst of the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign and by daybreak the city will be in ruins.
Harriet, widowed in 1914, recalls her past, the loss of her husband and a chance encounter with a woman named Maeve. Author Helen Humphreys offsets the horrors of war with her stark and poetic prose, and weaves together three lives in a tale of love and loss.
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Acknowledgements and awards:
2009 Finalist, Ontario Trillium Award
2008 Globe & Mail Top 100 Books
2008 NOW Magazine's Top 10 Books
2008 Ottawa Citizen's Top 10 Books
SPECIAL AUTHOR EVENT
Book Buzz Live Chat - Wednesday, November 25, 7-8 p.m.
Join author Helen Humphreys for a live online chat.
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Helen Humphreys, an award-winning Canadian poet, novelist, screenplay writer, and journalist, was born March 29, 1961 in England, emigrated to Canada in 1964, and now makes her home in Kingston, Ontario.
She began her literary career in 1986 with the poetry collection Gods and Other Mortals and has since produced three more critically acclaimed volumes. Her first novel, Leaving Earth, won the Toronto Book Award. She also regularly contributes poetry, short stories, and articles to periodicals, including Arc, Event, Grain, Fiddlehead Review, Malahat Review, New Quarterly, Quarry, and Poetry Canada Review.
Writing under the pseudonym Catherine Brett, Humphreys wrote two young adult novels, Things Just Aren't the Same and S. P. Likes A. D. for Women’s Press. Humphreys has been nominated for numerous literary prizes and has won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the CWA Poetry Award, and the Lambda Award for fiction. Coventry is her fifth novel.
Author website
Special Author Event:
Join author Helen Humphreys for a live online chat: Wed., November 25, 7-8 pm.
Author Interviews:
HarperCollins Prosecast (audio)
Ottawa Citizen
