Emancipation Day

Emancipation Day

Published:
2013-07-30
Categories:
ISBN:
9780385677677
Meeting:
2021-09-13 (meeting #56)
Chosen by:
Tom
Pages:
330
File size (e-book):
2.1MB
Download URL:

Description:

With his curly black hair and his wicked grin, everyone swoons and thinks of Frank Sinatra when Navy musician Jackson Lewis takes the stage.  It's World War II, and while stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland, Jack meets the well-heeled Vivian Clift, a local girl who has never stepped off the Rock and longs to see the world.  They marry against Vivian's family's wishes—there's something about Jack that they just don't like—and as the war draws to a close, the couple travels to Windsor to meet Jack's family.

But when Vivian meets Jack's mother and brother, everything she thought she knew about her husband gets called into question.  They don't live in the dream home Jack depicted, they all look different from one another—different from anyone Vivian has ever seen--and after weeks of waiting to meet Jack's father, he never materializes.

Steeped in jazz and big-band music, spanning pre- and post-war Windsor-Detroit, St. John's, Newfoundland, and 1950s Toronto, this is an arresting, heartwrenching novel about fathers and sons, love and sacrifice, race relations and a time in our history when the world was on the cusp of momentous change.

Author Details:

Wayne Grady is a Canadian writer, editor, and translator. He is the author of fourteen books of nonfiction, the translator of more than a dozen novels from the French, and the editor of many literary anthologies of fiction and nonfiction.