Tessa McWatt's Books

The Snow Line

By: Tessa McWatt

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Tessa McWatt's breathtaking new novel explores love and endurance in the face of change and violence, and how people find wholeness and belonging when their own identities feel shattered. Northern India, 2009. Four travellers disembark from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station, having arrived in Punjab to attend a wedding. Yosh, 30, a yoga teacher from Vancouver; Monica, 30, the bride's cousin from Toronto; Reema, 26, the bride's childhood friend, a mixed-heritage Londoner in search of her Indianness; and Jackson, 86, who is returning to India after a long hiatus in Boston, and who carries with him a small tea canister in which he has placed his wife Amelia's ashes. As they gather with other guests at the traditional Indian wedding, Jackson and Reema develop a reluctant, unlikely friendship that grows through mutual need and a slowly developing trust, and together with Yosh and Monica, they embark on a post-wedding journey to the Himalayas, seeking the perfect place to scatter Amelia's ashes. As they travel together, secrets are revealed, and each of them is opened up to more questions than answers. These intergenerational and intercultural relationships are a meeting of the past and the future, a reconciliation of past wrongs and a possibility that the future might be less violent, less selfish, less segregated. But can it be?

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Page Count

376

Publisher

Random House Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

1039000037

ISBN 13

9781039000032

Shame on Me

An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

By: Tessa McWatt

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Shame on Me

An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

By: Tessa McWatt

FINALIST FOR THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR NON-FICTION Interrogating our ideas of race through the lens of her own multi-racial identity, critically acclaimed novelist Tessa McWatt turns her eye on herself, her body and this world in a powerful new work of non-fiction. Tessa McWatt has been called Susie Wong, Pocahontas and "black bitch," and has been judged not black enough by people who assume she straightens her hair. Now, through a close examination of her own body--nose, lips, hair, skin, eyes, ass, bones and blood--which holds up a mirror to the way culture reads all bodies, she asks why we persist in thinking in terms of race today when racism is killing us. Her grandmother's family fled southern China for British Guiana after her great uncle was shot in his own dentist's chair during the First Sino-Japanese War. McWatt is made of this woman and more: those who arrived in British Guiana from India as indentured labour and those who were brought from Africa as cargo to work on the sugar plantations; colonists and those whom colonialism displaced. How do you tick a box on a census form or job application when your ancestry is Scottish, English, French, Portuguese, Indian, Amerindian, African and Chinese? How do you finally answer a question first posed to you in grade school: "What are you?" And where do you find a sense of belonging in a supposedly "post-racial" world where shadism, fear of blackness, identity politics and call-out culture vie with each other noisily, relentlessly and still lethally? Shame on Me is a personal and powerful exploration of history and identity, colour and desire from a writer who, having been plagued with confusion about her race all her life, has at last found kinship and solidarity in story.

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Page Count

242

Publisher

Random House Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0735277443

ISBN 13

9780735277441

Higher Ed

A Novel

By: Tessa McWatt

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Higher Ed

A Novel

By: Tessa McWatt

In her most powerful and resonant novel to date, the acclaimed writer Tessa McWatt explores the ways in which people find love in desperately uncertain times. Against a backdrop of 21st-century east London, where cuts and job crunches and unemployment are ugly, unrelenting realities, three very different love stories bloom. Francine, a university administrator who firmly believes that she is unattractive and unloveable, is unhinged after witnessing a tragic road accident. Cracked open, she is also on the verge of realizing that she is worth something to someone. Meanwhile Robin, a young film prof who Francine has lusted after from afar, is awoken to beauty in the form of the young Polish waitress in his local café, who cannot believe that he might love her back. And then there is Olivia, Robin's charismatic student, a mixed race girl growing up in a racist household, who thought she'd been abandoned by her father, Ed. Conducting research for a law school project on what society owes the dead, she stumbles across him working in a council office, where he's in charge of burying the indigent and unclaimed. Soon she realizes that Ed is not the kind of man who would abandon anybody. Thoughtful, poignant and profound, Higher Ed is a brilliantly observed novel that illuminates the human capacity for love, and lingers in the soul long after the last page is read.

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Page Count

243

Publisher

Random House Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0345814789

ISBN 13

9780345814784

Where Are You, Agnes?

By: Tessa McWatt

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Where Are You, Agnes?

By: Tessa McWatt

This stunning picture-book imagining of artist Agnes Martin’s childhood gives readers a glimpse into the life and work of one of the most esteemed abstract painters of the twentieth century. Agnes Martin was born on the Canadian prairies in the early twentieth century. In this imagining of her childhood from acclaimed author Tessa McWatt, Agnes spends her days surrounded by wheat fields, where her grandfather encourages her to draw what she sees and feels around her: the straight horizon, the feeling of the sun, the movement of birds’ wings and the shapes she sees in the wheat. One day, Agnes’s family moves to a house in a big city. The straight horizon and wheat fields are gone, but Agnes continues to draw what she sees and feels around her. No one except her grandfather understands what she is trying to capture — not her mother, who asks, “Where are you, Agnes?” when she sees her daughter engrossed in her drawing; nor her siblings, who think her art is ugly. Still, Agnes keeps trying to capture what she sees inside her mind. Agnes Martin grew up to become a famous abstract expressionist artist. Tessa McWatt has written a beautiful story of Agnes’s childhood and how it might have shaped her adult work. Zuzanna Celej’s watercolors adeptly capture Agnes’s world, including hints of the grid paintings that she was later known for, against the backdrop of prairie and city landscapes. Includes an author’s note with more information about Agnes Martin’s life and the inspiration behind this story. Key Text Features author's note art history Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.7 Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.

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Publisher

Groundwood Books Ltd

Published Date

ISBN 10

1773061410

ISBN 13

9781773061412

Shame on Me

An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

By: Tessa McWatt

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Shame on Me

An Anatomy of Race and Belonging

By: Tessa McWatt

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Page Count

242

Publisher

Random House Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0735277435

ISBN 13

9780735277434

Vital Signs

By: Tessa McWatt

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Vital Signs

By: Tessa McWatt

More and more every day I find myself drawn into the puzzle of her speech, determined to unravel meaning in each sentence, because now I’m sure it’s there, if I only listen to her in a way I have failed to listen for thirty years. – From Vital Signs by Tessa McWatt After thirty years of marriage, producing three now-grown children, Mike and Anna have settled into entrenched domesticity. She is skillful and poised and still beautiful, an instructor of English at the city college. He is a successful graphic artist on the verge of retirement, his awards and ambitions and accomplishments largely behind him. Though the couple’s erotic life has dimmed somewhat, he still considers her ravishing. But their apparent balance is thrown asunder when Anna breaks the normal silence of their breakfast table with uncontrollable babble about hummingbirds. After an emergency consultation with a neurologist, they have a diagnosis: confabulation, or the scrambling of time, memories and language due to a dangerous aneurysm in Anna’s brain that could burst at any moment. Not knowing how much time they have left with the beloved Anna, Mike and the kids rally together to support her through the terror of her disintegrating mind. But the unbearable strain of the situation is worsened by another worry that is haunting Mike: he suspects that his two eldest children, Charlotte and Fred, know of his past infidelity. Several years ago, Anna and Mike took a trip to Egypt, hoping the shared adventure would thwart their mid-life marriage blues. Instead, the trip deepened the chasm, his sexual jealousy and insecurities swamping her attempts at intimacy. Their estrangement worsened when they returned home to discover that their youngest daughter, Sasha, was in hospital, having overdosed on drugs. Anna was furious with Mike for his cool response at the time, which she interpreted as unfeeling. Two weeks later Mike began his affair, with a much younger woman dissimilar to Anna in all respects. He persisted in the romance for three years, feeling young and vital and once again in control, at least for a time. The affair is long over but today, as Anna disappears into a terrifying collapse of time and language, Mike is wracked by his dilemma: should he keep his silence about the affair and spare his family more pain, or should he seize the opportunity to be wholly honest with the woman he loves, possibly in the last days of her life? Perhaps the answer lies in his drawings, the means of communication with which he is most comfortable. Can he codify his emotions into pictures? Can he articulate his love and regret and sorrow to his wife – and to himself – without having to say the heart-rending words out loud? Narrated by a terrified male protagonist whose deep yearning for forgiveness might only be granted by a woman in the grips of dementia, Tessa McWatt’s Vital Signs is a thought-provoking and mesmerizing literary accomplishment – a compassionate and visceral study of a marriage at the brink of catastrophe.

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Page Count

178

Publisher

Random House Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307360024

ISBN 13

9780307360021

The Snow Line

By: Tessa McWatt

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The Snow Line

By: Tessa McWatt

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

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Page Count

257

Publisher

Random House Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

1039000029

ISBN 13

9781039000025

Book's by Tessa McWatt

The Snow Line

The Snow Line

Shame on Me

Shame on Me

Higher Ed

Higher Ed

Where Are You, Agnes?

Where Are You, Agnes?

Shame on Me

Shame on Me

Vital Signs

Vital Signs

The Snow Line

The Snow Line

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