Showing results by narrator "Amanda Barker" in All Categories

Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.

Diagnosed with three inoperable brain tumors, Stacey Fortune abandons the crumbling glamour of her life in Toronto for her mother’s scruffy trailer in rural Cape Breton. Back home she’s known as Crow, and everybody suspects that her family is cursed. With her future all but sealed, Crow decides to go down in a blaze of unforgettable glory by writing a memoir that will raise eyebrows and drop jaws. She’ll dig up “the dirt” on her family tree, including the supposed curse, and uncover the truth about her mysterious, absent father.

Niko Kiriakos, tentative heir to the ailing Calypso Shipping fleet, always suspected he was cursed. Following his sudden disappearance, his wife, Anna, and daughter, Zoe, are left adrift. Unmoored, they begin to test the boundaries of their lives, struggling with issues of loyalty, identity and what it means to be a family. Spanning years and tracing a route from Niagara Falls to Greece, Escape Plans is an unblinking look at the ties that bind us together and the things that pull us apart.

Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth. The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators - family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself - her family’s dark past, and the core of her mother’s despair, are slowly revealed.

Nina Stibbe came to fame with Love, Nina, a memoir of her time working as a nanny in 1980s literary London. It won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2014 National Book Awards, and was adapted into a hit BBC TV series. She has since written six more books, four of them novels, and a sparkling selection of her work is included here, alongside two fascinating interviews with Nina herself.