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The Break

ebook
4 of 4 copies available
4 of 4 copies available

Winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, The Break is a stunning and heartbreaking debut novel about a multigenerational Métis–Anishnaabe family dealing with the fallout of a shocking crime in Winnipeg's North End.

When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble on the Break — a barren field on an isolated strip of land outside her house — she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime.

In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim — police, family, and friends — tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night. Lou, a social worker, grapples with the departure of her live-in boyfriend. Cheryl, an artist, mourns the premature death of her sister Rain. Paulina, a single mother, struggles to trust her new partner. Phoenix, a homeless teenager, is released from a youth detention centre. Officer Scott, a Métis policeman, feels caught between two worlds as he patrols the city. Through their various perspectives a larger, more comprehensive story about lives of the residents in Winnipeg's North End is exposed.

A powerful intergenerational family saga, The Break showcases Vermette's abundant writing talent and positions her as an exciting new voice in Canadian literature.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 29, 2018
      Vermette’s piercing debut novel (following the poetry collection North End Love Songs) begins on a cold, snowy night, when Stella, a young Métis woman, looks out her window and witnesses an attack on a girl out on the Break—a tract of isolated land in Winnipeg’s North End. Frightened, she calls 911, but the girl and her attackers scatter into the night. The next day, the full weight of the situation is revealed: Emily, the 13-year-old daughter of Stella’s cousin Pauline, has been viciously assaulted and raped with a beer bottle. This is not a typical crime story. It is instead a harrowing mosaic, the fragments of which reveal the stories of Emily and her extended family, a young Métis police officer working on the case, as well those of the girls who attacked Emily. The story paints a broad picture of a family separated and brought together again, in different capacities, by varying forms of grief—and of another family, that of the perpetrator, shattered in ways seemingly impossible to mend, by drugs, crime and violence. Vermette portrays a wide array of strong, complicated, absolutely believable women, and through them and their hardships offers readers sharp views of race and class issues. This is slice-of-life storytelling at its finest. Agent: Marilyn Biderman, Transatlantic.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from February 15, 2018
      Vermette (North End Love Songs, 2012) deserves the many accolades this novel about four generations of Metis women has earned since its first publication, in Canada in 2016. An apt trigger warning appears on the title page before the inciting incident: the sexual assault of teenage Emily. In the days immediately following the attack, the family's womenand, to a lesser degree, its mengather and support, which prompts them to contemplate their own life experiences and choices. Each of the women has scars, and a member of the second generation suffered an early, violent death. Police work to identify Emily's attackers, but Vermette wisely shifts the focus to powerful why questions that fold in culture and identity. Multiple narrators combine into a collective experience of being on the outside, being subjected to poverty and violence, and being seen as inferior. The family matriarch, Kookom, provides the gravitational pull grounding the family, but she's in decline. The Metis women in this novel survive, endure, and heal, but they also carry exceptionally heavy burdens and pay exceptionally heavy prices. This intimate and emotional look at their lives succeeds both as a novel and as a work of social justice.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

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