Girls Fall Down
Maggie Helwig
(published by Coach House Books)
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What the judges said:
"Girls Fall Down introduces us to a photographer protagonist, and our own city as it meets the possibility of terrorism in 2002. Maggie Helwig pans wide and unflinching as Toronto's denizens confront paranoia and public attacks, and zooms in tight for a love story that takes us, drunk and diseased, into the ravines at night. Compelling, frightening and beautiful, this novel asks important questions about love and fear in our own neighbourhoods."
A girl faints in the Toronto subway while her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes. Panic grips the city, and words like terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over. Alex, a photographer whose sight is failing, rushes to capture Toronto on film before he loses his vision completely. Girls Fall Down is a novel of small gestures, showing the slide into paranoia, and the slide into love.
Maggie Helwig
Maggie Helwig has published six books of poetry, two books of essays, a collection of short stories, and two previous novels, Where She Was Standing and Between Mountains. Her newest novel, Girls Fall Down, appeared in NOW Magazine's and the National Post's lists of Top Ten Books of 2008.
Excerpt from Girls Fall Down
The city is a winter city, at its heart. Though the ozone layer is thinning above it, and the summers grow long and fierce, still the city
always anticipates winter. Anticipates hardship. In the winter, when it is raw and grey and dim, it is itself most truly.
People come here from summer countries and learn to be winter people. But there are worse fates. That is exactly why many of them come here, because there are far worse fates than winter.
It is a city that burrows, tunnels, turns underground. It has built strata of malls and pathways and inhabited spaces like the layers in an archaeological dig, a body below the earth, flowing with light.
People turn to buried places, to successive levels of basements, lowered courtyards, gardens under glass. There are beauties to winter that are unexpected, the silence of snow, the intimacy with which we curl around places of warmth. Even the homeless and the outcasts travel downwards when they can, into the ravines that slice around and under the streets, where the rivers, the Don and the Humber and their tributaries, carve into the heart of the city; they build homes out
of tents and slabs of metal siding, decorate them with bicycle wheels and dolls on strings and boxes of discarded books, with ribbons and mittens, and huddle in the cold beside the thin water.
It is hard to imagine this city being damaged by something from the sky. The dangers to this city enter the bloodstream, move through interior channels.
The girl was kneeling by the door of the subway car, a circle of friends surrounding her like birds. Her hands were over her narrow face, she was weeping, and there were angry red welts across her cheeks, white circles around them. Her friends touched her back, her arms, their voices an anxious chirp. There was a puddle of vomit at her feet, and she lowered one hand to wipe her mouth, leaning against the door.
A space had already cleared around them. Some of the passengers in the nearby seats held hands or tissues discreetly over their mouths, but as if this were incidental, as if they weren't quite aware . . . .
Read the Committee's comments on the other shortlisted books.
2009 shortlist:
