Elizabeth Kostova, Rabindranath Maharaj, Beth Powning

Rachel Harry was host and producer of BookTelevision’s flagship literary current events show The Word This Week, and has gone on to produce literary and arts programming for Canwest, CHUM, Bravo!, and CTV, most recently co-writing and producing a documentary special on the music industry for Canwest's E! Television.

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of the international bestseller The Historian. She graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress. She presents her new novel, The Swan Thieves, about a tormented artist, the lives of the women around him, and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.

Rabindranath Maharaj (Canada/Trinidad) was born in Trinidad and now lives in Ontario. He is the author of three previous award-nominated novels – A Perfect Pledge, The Lagahoo’s Apprentice and Homer in Flight – and two collections of short stories – The Ifs and Buts and The Interloper. Maharaj reads from, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, a humorous and heartbreaking new novel that will appeal to comic book lovers, teens, and Torontonians of all ages.

Beth Powning is the author of several books, including The Hatbox Letters, Edge Seasons and Shadow Child. She lives in an 1870 farmhouse with extensive gardens in Sussex, New Brunswick, with her husband, artist Peter Powning. Beth Powning’s latest novel, The Sea Captain’s Wife, is a 19th century tale of love and obsession, featuring a sea captain and his young wife and child, and their ill-fated voyage from the Bay of Fundy to London.

This humorous and heartbreaking new novel from one of Canada’s most dynamic literary voices tells the story of 16-year-old Samuel – a Trinidadian boy who is sent to live with his long-absent father in Canada after his mother’s death. Inexperienced in the world, but wise in the culture of comic books, Samuel embarks on the adventure of a lifetime in this strange, bustling, cold new land. Perfect for comic lovers, teens, and Torontonians of all ages, The Amazing Absorbing Boy provides a punchy start to our winter readings.

The titular wife of this sweeping 1860s adventure is Azuba Galloway, daughter of a shipwright on the Bay of Fundy. When her veteran sea captain husband is forced to take Azuba and their young child aboard his ship, the family sets sail for London with bitter hearts.

In Elizabeth Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and to the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism.