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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
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English
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MONKEY BEACH

Eden Robinson

A young Native American woman remembers her volatile childhood as she searches for her lost brother in the Canadian wilds in an extraordinary, critically acclaimed debut novel.
As she races along Canada’s Douglas Channel in her speedboat—heading toward the place where her younger brother Jimmy, presumed drowned, was last seen—twenty-year-old Lisamarie Hill recalls her younger days. A volatile and precocious Native girl growing up in Kitamaat, the Haisla Indian reservation located five hundred miles north of Vancouver, Lisa came of age standing with her feet firmly planted in two different worlds: the spiritual realm of the Haisla and the sobering “real” world with its dangerous temptations of violence, drugs, and despair. From her beloved grandmother, Ma-ma-oo, she learned of tradition and magic; from her adored, Elvis-loving uncle Mick, a Native rights activist on a perilous course, she learned to see clearly, to speak her mind, and never to bow down. But the tragedies that have scarred her life and ultimately led her to these frigid waters cannot destroy her indomitable spirit, even though the ghosts that speak to her in the night warn her that the worst may be yet to come.

Easily one of the most admired debut novels to appear in many a decade, Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach was immediately greeted with universal acclaim—called “gripping” by the San Diego Union-Tribune, “wonderful” by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and “glorious” by the Globe and Mail, earning nominations for numerous literary awards before receiving the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Evocative, moving, haunting, and devastatingly funny, it is an extraordinary read from a brilliant literary voice that must be heard.
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Book

Published 2023-10-11 by Knopf Canada

Book

Published 2023-05-30 by Knopf Canada

Comments

Monkey Beach is far more than a novel of psychological transformation, though it is that. It is, in the best sense, a thriller, a spiritual mystery.... The novel also contains some of the truest passages I have read on what it is like to be a teenager.... Puberty has rarely received such a perceptive and unflinching gaze. You can tell Monkey Beach is an original because you actually want to read it again. [This is a] startlingly accomplished first novel.

Robinson’s paean to the Pacific Northwest and Haisla culture, embodied in her stout-hearted hero and all her other vital and complex characters, does what good literature does best: It moves meaningfully from the particular to the universal and back again. And Robinson performs this enlightening feat with genuine insight, wry humor and translucent lyricism.

Beautifully written and haunting, this is an impressive debut.

Although death hangs like a Pacific mist over these pages, Robinson, herself a Haisla, fills this edifying book with the stuff of the living, from the tiniest details of Haisla life to the mightiest universals of tradition, desire and family love.

Film rights sold to Eagle Eye Films.

• Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2002 • Finalist for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, 2000 • Winner of the B.C. Book Prize for Fiction, 2001

US: Houghton Mifflin US eBook: Open Road UK: Little, Brown Book Group Canada: Knopf Germany: Rowohlt Verlag Netherlands: Prometheus France: Albin Michel Estonia: Hotger Czech: Havran France (Pocket Book Reprint): J’ai lu