ann marie macdonald fall on your knees summary

Fall on Your Knees was previously published in Canada, where it rose to the top of the bestseller lists.World Premiere NAC English Theatre Co-productionĪ National Arts Centre, Vita Brevis Arts, Canadian Stage, Neptune Theatre, Grand Theatre production.īased on Ann-Marie MacDonald’s best-selling debut novel, our closing installment of Fall On Your Knees takes us to Harlem and the early jazz scene. (Apr.) FYI: MacDonald began this book as a play but finished it five years later as her first work of fiction. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selections author tour. 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.

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. 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. But the bitter fruit of illicit passion will continue to take its toll on Kathleen's survivors. After Kathleen's death during childbirth and his wife's suicide a few days later, James forbids any mention of Kathleen's name.

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. 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. Not a single line is superfluous in this richly layered tale of the secrets within several generations of a Canadian family.

Ann marie macdonald fall on your knees summary