Ali Eteraz, Matthew Hooton, Michelle Wan

Ali Eteraz is a writer, activist and international lawyer who has worked in the United States Department of Justice and Park Avenue law firms. He writes a column for the Huffington Post and the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section. His essays on Islam have appeared in Killing the Buddha, Counterpunch and others. He presents his first prose work, Children of Dust, which was selected for the Fall Reading List by O: The Oprah Magazine and received praise from the Washington Post. The New Statesman chose it as one of their 2009 Books of the Year.

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.

Matthew Hooton grew up on Vancouver Island and published non-fiction in several Canadian periodicals before moving to England to complete an MA in creative writing. He now lives in Victoria, BC. Hooton presents his debut novel, Deloume Road, a haunting story about the ties that exist between the recently arrived and the long-established members of a small Vancouver Island community against the backdrop of the first Gulf War.

Michelle Wan was born in Kunming, China. She and her husband, a tropical horticulturalist, live in Guelph, Ontario, and travel regularly to the Dordogne to photograph and chart wild orchids. Wan presents Kill for an Orchid, the fourth book in the Death in the Dordogne series.

The first prose work from this well-known activist, columnist and blogger is a spellbinding portrayal of a life that few Americans can imagine. From his schooling in a madrassa in Pakistan to his teenage years as a Muslim American in the Bible Belt, and back to Pakistan to find a pious Muslim wife, Children of Dust captures the heart of a man’s quest for identity, and explores a universal human need to find a home.

This debut novel from one of Knopf Canada’s New Faces of Fiction for 2010 tells the story of a small rural community on Vancouver Island against the backdrop of the first Gulf War. Hooton paints portraits of both the newly arrived and long-established members of this peaceful community – but behind them all looms the shadow of Gerard Deloume, whose suicide in 1899 triggered a sequence of events that erupts a century later with violent and tragic consequences.

The fourth book in the Death in the Dordogne Series, Kill for an Orchid, spans two hemispheres and three centuries, taking readers on a suspenseful journey of greed, obsession and murder. In their idyllic corner of the French countryside, life is finally coming together for Mara and Julian. But murder, blackmail and the riddle of the legendary Yong Chun Hua (the flower of eternal youth) are just around the corner.