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Fritz Agency
Christian Dittus
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English
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THE BREAK

Katherena Vermette

A Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Shortlisted for the Governor's General Fiction Award 2016

When Stella, a young mother, looks out her window one evening and spots a young girl in trouble on the Break - a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house - she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime.

In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim - police, family, and friends - tell their personal stories leading up to the fateful night. Through their various perspectives, a larger more comprehensive story about the lives, conditions and circumstances of a marginalized community is exposed.

While THE BREAK centers around one particular native community in Canada, it has many universals that readers from all over will be curious about, and in some cases, may even identify with, such as, female violence; teen gangs; poverty; violence; drug and alcohol abuse; assimilation.The closely-observered world of poor and powerless families, particularly the women in those families and their desire to overcome their upbringing, makes for compelling reading, and it's a perspective that can be found in both Vermette's and Ferrante's novels.

WAS IN JENER NACHT GESCHAH
Deutsch von Kathrin Razum
[HC btb 03/19; TB Btb 07/2021]
Available products
Book

Published 2016-09-01 by House of Anansi Press

Comments

The lives of the girls and women in The Break are not easy, but their voices - complex, urgent, and unsparing - lay bare what it means to survive, not only once, but multiple times, against the forces of private and national histories. Katherena Vermette is a tremendously gifted writer, a dazzling talent. -- Madeleine Thien, winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair's 2015 Literaturpreis and author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Dogs at the Perimeter, and Certainty

Finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, 2016.

(... Vermette is a fully matured literary talent confronting some of our society's fundamental problems through understated prose that exudes wisdom and emotion. --- National Post Read more...

French (North America): Québec Amérique;

(...) The Break is an astonishing act of empathy, and its conclusion is heartbreaking. A thriller gives us easy answers - a victim and a perpetrator, good guys and bad guys. The Break gives us the actual mess of life. -- The Globe and Mail Read more...

Margaret E. Atwood's tweets vom 26.9.2016: I loved this - The Break - House of Anansi Press... very tough and real. (...) The Break is an incredible feat of storytelling (...) Every page of The Break hides beauty amid suffering.

(...) Full of richly drawn, perfectly imperfect characters, and as difficult as the subject matter is, The Break is impossible to put down. In writing as beautiful as it is stark (...) -- Toronto Star Read more...