Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald

What a wild ride -- I couldn't turn the pages fast enough, Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced Fall on Your Knees as her February 2002 Book Club selection. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald's dark, insightful and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national bestseller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages. At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother's piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters -- beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family's burden; and disabled Lily, everyone's favourite -- forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father. Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York's Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death,joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed (The New York Times Book Review). As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one's family history gradually raises itself. The book's epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey towards tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions. The Sunday Times wrote, It is the unpredictability of this huge book that is its greatest joy. With allusions ranging from Hollywood stars to religious tracts, Fall on Your Knees simmers with vibrancy and crackling, effervescent, breathtaking language. Editorial Reviews Much-lauded Canadian actress and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald -- winner of several prestigious drama awards for her play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) -- turns her hand to fiction with this remarkable debut novel. The sweeping saga of a deeply troubled Nova Scotia family, Fall on Your Knees is an anguished yet wise and darkly humorous tale that weaves deftly back and forth in time to cover five generations of the Piper clan -- from late-19th-century Nova Scotia to the battlefields of World War I to Manhattan's vibrant 1920s music scene, and back to Nova Scotia. MacDonald gracefully tackles tragic events and disturbing secrets -- rape, incest, death, disease, the stigma of out-of-wedlock pregnancy -- that come to light as family members search for truth, understanding, and redemption. - bn.com By turns dark and hilariously funny, this stunning fiction debut by an award-winning writer and actor takes readers on a mystically charged journey spanning five generations of one family's sin, guilt, and redemption -- a narrative feast of racial strife, miracles, terrible secrets, and a passionate, enduring love. - Book of Books Not a single line is superfluous in this richly layered tale of the secrets within several generations of a Canadian family. Both feverishly intense and darkly humorous, the drama of the Piper family emerges amidst a backdrop of racial tension and social change in Canada during the first half of the 20th century. Piano tuner James Piper dotes on his beautiful and musically talented eldest daughter, Kathleen, almost to the exclusion of everyone else, including his Lebanese wife and his other daughters. After Kathleen's death during childbirth and his wife's suicide a few days later, James forbids any mention of Kathleen's name. But the bitter fruit of illicit passion will continue to take its toll on Kathleen's survivors. Though the mortality rate in this family sometimes challenges credibility, playwright and actress MacDonald's ambitious first novel displays a remarkable assurance of style, pacing and plotting as unexpected twists propel a complex story that builds inexorably to tragedy. MacDonald uses the surface tension and love between James and his daughters to explore the repercussions of repression, sin, guilt and violence that simmer beneath the family's delicately maintained equilibrium. Her gifts for character development, comic dialogue and vivid evocation of social milieu and specific background detail-from Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, to New York City in the 1920s-add texture to an entrancing narrative. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections; author tour. (Apr.) FYI: MacDonald began this book as a play but finished it five years later as her first work of fiction. Fall on Your Knees was previously published in Canada, where it rose to the top of the bestseller lists. - Publishers Weekly At her brightest moments, when various cultures and voices clash and merge in a great rush of energetic prose, MacDonald nears Rushdie-like height. -San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle - Rachel Stoll Fall on Your Knees does not disappoint; this is an ambitiously big story-refreshingly old-fashioned in its wide scope, the sheer number of central characters, and the tale's own epic-like complexity. -Detroit News Flash Free Press - Liesel Litzenburger This big, bold, epic-shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oats in her Gothic....It's a wild ride. -Chicago Tribune - Industries Staff Scosche A magnificent novel...[Fall on Your Knees] falls into the current traditions of a big story widely told, a story of historical change in a community of crime half-revealed through a family's memories and fearful secrets slowly revealed. -The London Sunday Times - Philippa Gregory A phenomenal novel....These are the sorts of characters, both beautiful and ugly, who stay with you forever. -Time Out London - Emma Perry From award-winning Canadian actress and playwright MacDonald comes a full-bodied, ever-rolling debut, the story of a talented Cape Breton family with more than its share of repression and tragedy. As the 19th century ends, young James Piper travels from the Breton hinterland to the civilized port of Sydney seeking his fortune, and in no time at all he acquires a child bride, a house built by his Lebanese father-in-law, and the everlasting enmity of his wife's powerful family. Although the ardor between James and his spouse soon cools, they now have a daughter, Kathleen, who seems destined for great things when her breathtaking voice and beauty begin to captivate all as she enters her teens. But another shadow falls on the family when James finds himself making improper advances to her. Appalled, he patches things up with his wife (two more daughters being the result), goes off to fight in WW I, and sends Kathleen to New York to study voice after he returns. All still isn't well, however, when she comes home pregnant six months later, then dies in childbirth when Mom slices her open to save her daughter's twins. One of them dies anyway, followed two days later by Mom, who commits suicide. James is left with three girls to raise, all of them scarred for life by the crisis: The newborn contracts polio when her aunt Frances, a child herself, tries to baptize her in a nearby creek; Frances is raped by James in his grief at losing Kathleen; the eldest, a witness to the rape, is also the one to find her mother's body. Such awful events, though quickly repressed, bode no good for the family, and ultimately tragedy overtakes them all. A plate piled dangerously high with calamities, perhaps, but the time, place, and people-especially the children-all ring clear and true, making for an accomplished, considerably affecting saga. - Kirkus Reviews #1 National Bestseller Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book Oprah's Book of the Month Club Pick, January 2002 Winner of the Dartmouth Book Award Winner of the Canadian Authors' Association Award Winner of the CBA Libris People's Choice Award Winner of the CBA Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year Finals for The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Finalist for the Giller Prize Finalist for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award Finalist for the Trillium Book Award Finalist for The Orange Prize for Fiction Magnetic... a dizzying leap into a mind so rich and complex you spend almost as much time marvelling how she got there as enjoying the results... Compelling and original... MacDonald succeeds brilliantly in building a world that, at least for the satisfying length of time it takes to finish Fall On Your Knees, gloriously supersedes all else. Financial Post Beautiful... this big, bold, epic shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oates. It is history told with a thumping, complex narrative... a host of colourful characters and a great big bow to psychology... Fall On Your Knees is the work of a big talent. It's a wild ride. Chicago Tribune [MacDonald is] a first-rate novelist.... [She] paints a Cape Breton landscape steeped in human emotion ... She has found the language of the heart that runs below everyday discourse.... There is no resisting this story. The Globe and Mail Ann-Marie MacDonald -- one of Canada's most talented actors and playwrights -- has provided us with yet another aspect of a talent that has no limits. Timothy Findley Brilliant... Profoundly and refreshingly different.... MacDonald has constructed a plot worthy of Victor Hugo... A standout. Vancouver Sun MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise. The Montreal Gazette ... a narrative presence that can look at the unbearable, and sustain the emotion of it, and deliver it up edged in mordant wit. --EDITOR'S CHOICE, Notable Books of 1996, The Globe and Mail ... a multi-generational saga ... carried off with great assurance and style. --Philip Marchand, CRITIC'S CHOICE, The Toronto Star ... utterly compelling -- a brilliant take on the black themes of racism, physical and emotional battery, sexual abuse, suicide, and murder. --The Vancouver Review Stunning...The book and the talent behind it are big. The story is riveting, the characters achingly human, and the writing will take your breath away...[MacDonald] has leapt into the first rank of fiction writers. --Toronto Star A delicious story, one of those sweeping family sagas to take on summer vacation and savor.... MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise. She has a dramatic touch that can elicit gasps from readers. --Montreal Gazette Not a single line is superfluous in this richly layered tale of the secrets within several generations of a Canadian family. --Publisher's Weekly starred review February 24th, 1997 Here is an explosive mix of family feuds and incest, musical dreams and melodrama, all shot through with a fierce guilt... Fall On Your Knees is a heady, haunting brew, carefully structured, witty and distinctive. --The London Observer Some wonderful writing has come out of Canada in recent years from such authors as Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood. Now they are joined by the multi-talented Ann-Marie MacDonald... She is already a successful actress & playwright. It seems almost unfair that she should have written a brilliant first novel. --Sunday Telegraph - From the Publisher