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Matters of Hart / Marianne Ackerman.

by Ackerman, Marianne.

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McArthur & Company, c2005.

Life change events -- Fiction.

Siblings -- Fiction.

Montréal (Québec) -- Fiction.

Vancouver (B.C.) -- Fiction.

9781552785355 (trade pbk.)

1552785351 (trade pbk.)

230 p. ; 23 cm.

"When a stranger crashes Hart Granger's 50th birthday party in Montreal, conversation stops. Hart and his sister Amanda recall a lie Hart told her when they were kids. "We had an older brother named Bill," Hart once whispered to the impressionable five-year-old. "He had to leave the family to make room for you..." Embellished at every turn, the story haunted her childhood. Suddenly, the lie incarnate is standing in front of them — Neil Springer, a baby their mother put up for adoption when she became pregnant at 17. Neil is tall, dark, handsome, 55 but he looks much younger, and he once played forward for the NHL. Hart is plumpish, divorced, bored by life, a child prodigy with many unrealized ambitions. While Amanda is thrilled to have a new big brother, the towering presence of an affable, small-town American sends Hart into a tailspin. He flees to California. Given a chance to fake his own death on September 11, 2001, he leaps. The decision lands him in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where he is drawn into the tragic fate of an ailing Cree artist, and confronted with the deepest meaning of brotherhood. Set in Montreal, Los Angeles and Vancouver amid a backdrop of international terrorism, Matters of Hart is emotionally gripping and often wickedly funny. It's a Rip Van Winkle story about a guy whose destiny is shaped by desperation and imagination. Stylistically innovative, the novel tracks Hart's journey from multiple perspectives. First, through the eyes of five women in his life: Amanda recalls how the saga of the banished brother shaped her destiny. A German girl is inspired by meeting Hart on the night of his 'death'. His ex-wife, Sandrine, is liberated by his apparent demise and strikes up with a younger man. Hart's mother relives the secret that haunted his adolescence. And Wanda, a born-again Christian, enters a spiral of jealousy as her husband Neil grows besotted by his newfound family. Then close-up on Hart: a scribbled confessional account of his seven-month stay in Vancouver, which he writes while traveling across Canada by train. Finally, Hart's dramatic return to Montreal. Back from the dead, he's a changed man."--Publisher.

Psychological fiction.

Canadian fiction.

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