About

No time like the present for these two magical realism novels by Scott Alexander Howard and Shelley Wood. In Howard’s The Other Valley, Jimmy Fallon’s Book Club Top Four Pick, his protagonist lives in the present, a town surrounded by a border; in one direction is the same town twenty years ahead; in the other, the same town twenty years behind. Wood’s The Leap Year Gene follows a girl born on February 29, who only ages once every four years. Through her story we experience sweep of 20^th century history as she tries to protect her secret. Together they explore a morality tale as old as time.

Moderator: Janet Smyth

The Other Valley

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The Leap Year Gene

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Scott Alexander Howard

Scott Alexander Howard lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, where his work focused on the relationship between memory, emotion and literature. The Other Valley is his first novel.

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Shelley Wood

Shelley Wood is a Canadian writer and journalist. Her breakout debut novel, The Quintland Sisters, sold approximately 50,000 copies in North America and debuted as a #1 bestseller on the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail fiction lists, holding the top spot for five weeks, then ending the year as #7 on the list of the top 10 bestselling books of 2019.

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Photo credit: Hailey Pacey Wood.