Sat, Oct 31  •  4:30pm

The Price of a Better Life

Randy Boyagoda and Priya Guns

Join for a conversation on wealth, class, immigrant families

Fiction
Conversation
Pass Required
Passes available
The Price of a Better Life
The Price of a Better Life

Sat, Oct 31  •  4:30pm

The Price of a Better Life

Randy Boyagoda and Priya Guns

Join for a conversation on wealth, class, immigrant families

Conversation
Fiction
Pass Required
Passes available

About

Join authors Randy Boyagoda and Priya Guns as they talk about their latest novels on class and wealth in immigrant communities. In Boyagoda’s Lords of Serendipity centres on two teenage girls from different backgrounds who both dream of attending Harvard, exposing inequality behind higher education and the sacrifices families make to get there. While in Hustle, Baby, Priya Guns tells of a Tamil family flees Sri Lanka and falls for a get rich quick scheme at a huge cost. Together, they’ll explore the pursuit of wealth and opportunity, the pressures placed on immigrant families, and what happens when the promise of a better life comes at a devastating cost.

From the incendiary voice behind Your Driver is Waiting, a riotous novel following a family of Tamil refugees who fled civil war in Sri Lanka to pursue a better life, just for it to be up-ended by the schemes of a self-proclaimed day-trading savant, jeopardizing everything they’ve worked so desperately to secure. It’s hard enough to be a teenager at the turn of the millennium, and especially so for Dilo, who on top of juggling school and caring for her baby-cousin Maysha, is tasked with hustling to help her family get by. After Dilo’s born-again Christian mother, Mary, and Aunt Anji relocated the family from Sri Lanka fleeing the civil war, one thing’s become blindingly clear—the “rags-to-riches” fairytale they were promised is bullshit.

Published by Penguin Random House Canada

A wildly funny and richly resonant novel about the absurdities and hypocrisies of twenty-first-century higher education and what parents will sacrifice to get their children into the schools of their dreams, from a celebrated Canadian novelist Devi is a Sri Lankan village girl who dreams of going to Harvard. Katrina is a middle-class American girl whose life has been designed to get her into an elite liberal arts college.

Published by HarperCollins Canada

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist who writes about books and ideas for publications including The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the Financial Times. He is a professor of English and director of the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto.

Priya Guns  is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel Your Driver Is Waiting. A former teacher, she is an actor and an arborist in training whose previous work has been published in short story anthologies, gal-dem, Spring magazine, and anonymously in the Guardian.

Dates & Times

Sat, Oct 31
4:30pm
5:30pm
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 Chapel, Room 319

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