Howard Norman

Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. Their brief, erotically charged marriage is extinguished with Elizabeth’s murder. Sam’s life afterward is complicated. In a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films, whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat-and-mouse game between the two men. Furthermore, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth—not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and what at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.

As with many of us, the life of acclaimed novelist Howard Norman has had its share of incidents of “arresting strangeness.” Yet few of us connect these moments, as Norman has done in this spellbinding memoir, to show how life tangles with the psyche to become art. Norman’s story begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic tutelage of his brother’s girlfriend. His life story continues in places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade as a translator of Inuit tales—including the story of a soapstone carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is “I hate to leave this beautiful place”—and in his beloved Point Reyes, California, as a student of birds. In the Arctic, he receives news over the radio that “John Lennon was murdered tonight in the city of New York in the USA.” And years later, in Washington, D.C., another act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet and her young son. Norman’s story is also stitched together with moments of uncanny solace. Of life in his Vermont farmhouse Norman writes, “Everything I love most happens most every day.”

The final book in Howard Norman's Canadian Trilogy: a novel about spirit-photographs, adultery, and greed. It is 1927, Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist, Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter arrives in Chruchill on the very night of his employer's wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna's brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala as he reluctantly comes to share her obsession with "spirit pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear -- and he sees more adn more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom. Howard Norman's The Haunting of L. is a chilling fable of moral blindness and artistic ambition, from a writer of "complexly tragic vision" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times).

Like many of Howard Norman's celebrated novels, this intense and intriguingly unconventional love story begins with a crime. David Kozol has assaulted his father-in-law on a London street. What could possibly enrage David enough that he would strike the father of his new bride? Why would William, the gentle caretaker of an estate in Nova Scotia -- along with its flock of swans -- be so angry at the man who has just married his beloved daughter Maggie? And what would lead Maggie to believe that David has been unfaithful to her? At its core, Devotion is an elegantly constructed, unsparing examination of love in its various forms -- romantic, filial -- and of course, love for the vast open spaces of the natural world.

In the fall of 1977, Howard Norman went to Churchill, Manitoba, to translate Inuit folktales, and there he met Helen Tanizaki, an extraordinary linguist translating the same tales into Japanese. In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures their intimacy, and the remarkable influence that she, and the tales themselves, would have on the future novelist. Through a series of overlapping panels of reality and memory, Norman evokes with vivid immediacy their brief but life-shifting encounter, and the earthy, robust Inuit folklore that occasioned it.

Bringing together eight previously published stories the bestselling author of The Bird Artist explores the lives of characters who share a sense of loneliness and obsession. In the title story Tokyo-born Mrs. Moro is driven every day by her chauffeur, Tuttle Albers, so that she can walk the beach in hope of seeing white pelicans while her driver reads the Japanese authors she lends him and falls in love with a zoologist; in "Jenny Aloo" an Eskimo woman believes her missing son's soul is trapped inside a jukebox; and in "Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad" the narrator keeps track of a woman by whom he once spurned for nearly a decade while everything around him changes.

In the frozen wilderness of northern Manitoba, fourteen-year old Noah Krainik lives with his mother and cousin. With his quirky, cheerful best friend, Pelly Bay, he explores this exotic, lonely land - the domain of Cree Indians, trappers, missionaries, and fugitives from the modern world. When tragedy strikes, Noah must go on alone, discovering a new life in the south and the bustling of Toronto. It is there in the Northern Lights movie theatre -- with a Cree family taking up residence in the projection booth, and the reappearance of his elusive father - that Noah becomes an adult.

DeFoe Russet works with his uncle Edward as a guard in Halifax's three-room Glace Museum. He and his uncle disturb the silence of the museum with heated conversations that prove them to be "opposites at life." Away from the museum, DeFoe courts the affection of Imogen Linny, the young caretaker of the small Jewish cemetery. Everything changes when Imogen, inspired by the arrival of a painting, Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam, abandons Halifax for the ennobled life she imagines for the painting's subject - even amid the gorwing perilousness of being a Jew in Amsterdam. Set against the impending events of World War II, The Museum Guard, the second book of his Canadian trilogy, explores the mysteries of identity and self-determination, and the desire to step our of the ordinary into an alluring and dangerous sphere of action.