Toronto Book Awards 2002 short list:
Courage My Love
by Sarah Dearing
Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited
This biographical information and excerpt is posted courtesy of Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited.
Courage My Love
Philippa Maria Donahue is an Irish-American newcomer to Toronto whose response to her predictable marriage is to throw aside her antiseptic condominium life in upscale Yorkville for total immersion in the brash, artistic, odorous streets of Kensington Market. Changing her name to Nova Philip, she remakes her life, setting up house in a rented room over a store, shaping her appearance to match her new identity, learning the unique rhythms of Kensington society and its colourful characters.
When events push Nova to the brink of physical danger, will she return to the safety of her old life, or continue to embrace the risks of the new?
Sarah Dearing
Sarah Dearing's first novel, The Bull Is Not Killed, was published in 1998 by Stoddart Publishing in Canada and Secker & Warburg in the United Kingdom. She is currently at work on a collection of linked short stories and a collaborative project that will explore the concept of the muse in both visual art and the written word. Dearing lives in Toronto.
Courage My Love - excerpt
"Nova Philip promenaded in her fugue state along the main streets and consumed the sights and smells for breakfast. She thought of an old John Denver song about filling up senses and wondered how long that could sustain her. Since she couldn't pull more than one line of chorus from her memory, she abandoned the idea, focused on observation while eating a peach.
Here was a derelict rowboat on a roof, converted to a planter above a fish shop. There, plastic cod heads with fierce looks seemed to poke through an awning to stare at their salted and splayed-out bodies stacked beside them. A couple of calamine mannequins, naked on a peaked dormer, looked alive, like they somehow enjoyed straddling burning shingles. Near the top of Augusta Avenue she went into Freshly Baked Goods for a croissant, but the place sold handknit sweaters, not cakes and cookies. A Million Articles did describe its dusty boxes of buttons and threads, and the Kensington Trading Post proved to be an excellent source of outdated appliances and electronics. Nova would have walked right by the Yes, Yes Store, had a tape deck not been set out front among the hankies and hosiery. Marching music and a recorded voice chanting "Only twenty-five cents; nothing over fifty cents" lured her under a weary awning into a little cubbyhole of an establishment. The originator of the voice sat inside, wheelchair bound and bereft of huckster spirit. His merchant ventriloquism, spanning both space and time, caused church giggles to wrack Nova's shoulders, and she quickly left. She was able to laugh our loud in front of Courage My Love, and bought herself an amulet of bravery, a brightly braided bracelet she swore she'd never remove.
Sensory overload made her forget to worry about the steps she had taken, made her forget herself. She had always tried to see with wide eyes, but it was still only what she wanted to see, what had been suggested by the guidebooks, or a particular and personal agenda for being in situ. Confronted at each step with signs announcing Dementia; Exile; Noise, even her room above Asylum failed to shout its significance in an audible pitch. Courage My Love was what she needed most and so Courage My Love was what she saw."
