Sat, Oct 31  •  11am

Ghosts, Secrets & The Uncanny: The Boundless Horizons of Queer Fiction

Saleem Haddad and Jordan Tannahill

Join these two best-selling authors for a conversation on Queer literature

Fiction
Conversation
Pass Required
Passes available
Ghosts, Secrets & The Uncanny: The Boundless Horizons of Queer Fiction
Ghosts, Secrets & The Uncanny: The Boundless Horizons of Queer Fiction

Sat, Oct 31  •  11am

Ghosts, Secrets & The Uncanny: The Boundless Horizons of Queer Fiction

Saleem Haddad and Jordan Tannahill

Join these two best-selling authors for a conversation on Queer literature

Conversation
Fiction
Pass Required
Passes available

About

Join two of modern literature’s most daring voices for an electrifying conversation on the mechanics of obsession and the weight of family legacies. In Floodlines Saleem Haddad’s sweeping, tension-filled novel set between London and Baghdad, domestic intimacy becomes a pressure cooker of family drama, hidden histories, and queer identity. Meanwhile, award-winning Canadian playwright, Jordan Tannahill’s new novel, The Living Realm, sees an unexpected encounter in Berlin send a British expat spiraling into an obsessive twilight zone where the line between living desire and dead lovers dissolves. Both authors examine how queer narratives use memory, myth, and the uncanny to redefine what it means to belong and what happens when the past you’ve tried to escape comes back to demand a reckoning.

In this slim but expansive novel from acclaimed and Giller Prize-shortlisted author Jordan Tannahill, a British archaeologist living in Berlin begins to see his dead lovers in a cruising forest on the city’s outskirts. While cruising one evening by Teufelssee, a small glacial lake in the Grunewald forest on the edge of Berlin, a man spots a handsome stranger who bears an uncanny resemblance to his former lover. Only, Lukas died nearly thirty years ago.

Published by HarperCollins Canada

Set between London and Baghdad, Saleem Haddad’s brilliant second novel is a sweeping, multigenerational tale of art, exile, memory, and the enduring legacies of war. In the summer of 2014, three long estranged Iraqi-British sisters are pulled back into each other’s orbit by the rediscovery of their late father’s long-lost paintings. Beautiful, elusive Zainab; embittered, practical Mediha; and headstrong, queer Ishtar each lay claim to their father’s legacy—an artistic and personal inheritance entwined with betrayal, exile, and a homeland they no longer recognize.

Published by Europa Editions

Saleem Haddad was born in Kuwait City to a Palestinian-Lebanese father and an Iraqi-German mother, and educated in Jordan, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has worked as an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and has advised on humanitarian and peacebuilding issues throughout West Asia and North Africa.

Jordan Tannahill is a novelist and playwright. His debut novel, Liminal, received France’s 2021 Prix des Jeunes Libraires.

Dates & Times

Sat, Oct 31
11:00am
12:00pm
A book signing will follow this event

Tickets

Full Festival Pass
SOLD OUT
Regular $159
Under 30 $79
5-Day Festival Pass
Includes 5-day festival events. Excludes Masterclasses.
Regular $159
Under 30 $79
2-Day Weekend
Includes all Victoria University events. Excludes Winter Garden Theatre events and Masterclasses.
Regular $69
Under 30 $39
1-Day Saturday
Includes all Saturday events.
Excludes Masterclasses.
Regular $39
Under 30 $29
Pass Information
5-Day Festival Pass includes Barbara Kingsolver and East West Street: A Song of Good & Evil .
2-Day Weekend and 1-Day Passes do not include Winter Garden Theatre events.

Venue

Emmanuel College, Room 119
75 Queen's Park Crescent, Toronto, ON

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