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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
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LEAR'S SHADOW
For readers of Ann Patchett, Governor General's Award finalist and twice longlisted Scotiabank Giller Prize author Claire Holden Rothman's LEAR'S SHADOW tells the mesmerizing story of Beatrice Rose who, after losing her career and the love of her life, has lost her way and finds herself stuck caring for her aging father only to discover the fascinating world of an urban Shakespeare troupe which unveils new meanings, a new love, and a new life
A father-daughter story at its heart with an ode to Shakespeare's King Lear woven throughout, this is a mesmerizing story about a woman's mid-life crisis.
Summer 2012. Beatrice Rose, the black sheep of a successful Montreal family, returns to her childhood home in the rich enclave of Westmount to look after her father, a once-powerful businessman now lapsing into senility. Nearing forty, Bea is broke, childless, alone. When she's offered a job as an assistant stage manager with a local Shakespeare-in-the-park troupe, she seizes the opportunity despite her utter lack of theatre experience. The troupe is presenting King Lear outdoors. As Bea's father slips into dementia, she spends her evenings in the mosquito-filled shadows of the city's parks, watching another old man unravel onstage, his decline immortalized by Shakespeare's verse.
Phil Grand, the actor playing Lear, is a man of notorious wantonness. Yet Bea feels drawn to him, despite (or is it because of?) his resemblances to her father. Meanwhile, Artie White, the troupe's artistic director, who is also playing Lear's Fool, seems bent on finding fault with everything Bea does, whether she's awkwardly fending off Phil's advances or struggling, in the early weeks of production, to meet the many requirements of her job.
Lear's Shadow is the story of an adult daughter facing the decline of her aged father into a second childhood. It's an examination of conventional notions of success and failure, and the damages wrought by applying such measures of human worth. It's a meditation on the nature and significance of the shadowin every sense of that word. There is a moment in King Lear when the old monarch, aware of how vulnerable and diminished he has become, asks, Who is it hat can tell me who I am? The Fool answers: Lear's shadow.
CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN is the author of two story collections and the novels My October, a finalist for the the 2014 Governor General's Award in fiction and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and The Heart Specialist, also longlisted for a Giller, and published in six countries. Her translation of Canada's first novel, L'influence d'un livre (The Influence of a Book) by Philippe - Ignace - François Aubert de Gaspé, won the John Glassco Translation Prize. She lives in Montreal with playwright Arthur Holden.
Summer 2012. Beatrice Rose, the black sheep of a successful Montreal family, returns to her childhood home in the rich enclave of Westmount to look after her father, a once-powerful businessman now lapsing into senility. Nearing forty, Bea is broke, childless, alone. When she's offered a job as an assistant stage manager with a local Shakespeare-in-the-park troupe, she seizes the opportunity despite her utter lack of theatre experience. The troupe is presenting King Lear outdoors. As Bea's father slips into dementia, she spends her evenings in the mosquito-filled shadows of the city's parks, watching another old man unravel onstage, his decline immortalized by Shakespeare's verse.
Phil Grand, the actor playing Lear, is a man of notorious wantonness. Yet Bea feels drawn to him, despite (or is it because of?) his resemblances to her father. Meanwhile, Artie White, the troupe's artistic director, who is also playing Lear's Fool, seems bent on finding fault with everything Bea does, whether she's awkwardly fending off Phil's advances or struggling, in the early weeks of production, to meet the many requirements of her job.
Lear's Shadow is the story of an adult daughter facing the decline of her aged father into a second childhood. It's an examination of conventional notions of success and failure, and the damages wrought by applying such measures of human worth. It's a meditation on the nature and significance of the shadowin every sense of that word. There is a moment in King Lear when the old monarch, aware of how vulnerable and diminished he has become, asks, Who is it hat can tell me who I am? The Fool answers: Lear's shadow.
CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN is the author of two story collections and the novels My October, a finalist for the the 2014 Governor General's Award in fiction and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and The Heart Specialist, also longlisted for a Giller, and published in six countries. Her translation of Canada's first novel, L'influence d'un livre (The Influence of a Book) by Philippe - Ignace - François Aubert de Gaspé, won the John Glassco Translation Prize. She lives in Montreal with playwright Arthur Holden.
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Book
Published 2018-07-01 by Penguin Canada |