It’s just been announced that Lawrence Hill’s latest novel The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins) is one of the Canada Reads contenders this year. Long before that work made the must-read list there had to be the prerequisite debut novel and the Between the Covers podcast has it. Some Great Thing (Turnstone) is Lawrence Hill’s sometimes comic look at life in the journalism trenches for a young reporter gifted—or burdened—with a famous name.
Mahatma Grafton’s father decided his son would do “some great thing” so gave him a name befitting a hero.
Unfortunately Mahatma is too busy chasing local newspaper stories to give proper consideration to his larger potential.
Each episode of Between the Covers is between 15 and seventeen minutes. The current instalments are below. If you wish to catch up with previous episodes, click here.*
Episode four: Mahatma is drawn into the trials and tribulations of Jake Corbett.
Episode five: Mahatma gets the police beat and learns about French-English tensions in Manitoba.
Episode six: Tensions escalate after a francophone boy is killed in a hockey game.
If you missed previous podcasts you can download them at Between the Covers podcasts.
And if you’re interested in readings of other Canadian books, check out the Hear A Reading page on the Between the Covers site. At the moment, you can listen to Richard Scrimger’s poignant novel Still Life With Children (HarperCollins) and Wayne Johnston’s fictional biography The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (Vintage).
(Photo credit: Lisa Sak)
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