Howard Norman Books In Order

The Northern Lights

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.

The Bird Artist

Howard Norman’s The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women.

The Museum Guard

When the famous Dutch painting ‘Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam’ arrives at a museum in Halifax, a disturbed young woman abandons her life in favor of the one she imagines for the painting’s subject even as being a Jew in Amsterdam becomes more perilous as the clouds of World War II gather in Europe. /Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content On September 5, 1938, DeFoe Russet helps hang a new show at a tiny Nova Scotia museum. He doesn’t even pay much attention to the eight new paintings from Holland; he’ll have time enough to take them in later on. After all, the buttoned down 25 year old is one of two people at Halifax’s Glace Museum paid to watch out for the art, to stop people from getting too close to it. But DeFoe also knows that ‘as a guard you had emotions. You got to know paintings better than you got to know the people in your life. Speaking for myself.’

The other guard and the man who raised him after his parents died in a zeppelin crash when he was 9 is his Uncle Edward. Edward is certainly not the steadiest fellow employee or familial influence. He devotes his nights to drinking, poker, and charming women at the Lord Nelson, the hotel where both men live, and his days to hangovers, somnolence, and generally harassing museumgoers. DeFoe, at least, is a model employee. Yet his personal life cannot be quite so regulated, and for the last two years he has been frustrated in his relationship with a caretaker at the local Jewish cemetery. He seems to expend most of his energy anticipating Imogen Linny’s moods, as*sessing the power of her headaches, and banging his head against her nocturnal mixed messages and philosophizing. As the novel progresses, Imogen also grows increasingly obsessed with one of the newly arrived paintings, Jewess on a Street in Amsterdam.

Soon, DeFoe puts his career in jeopardy for Imogen, stealing the picture for her though this is only one of the mysteries at the heart of Howard Norman’s strange and startling third novel, The Museum Guard. Through DeFoe’s eyes, we, too, begin to understand the allure of the painting, in which a woman pushes a bicycle and holds a loaf of bread, the shop window behind her filled with toothbrushes. ‘The toothbrushes made me laugh. They quickly put me in a good mood,’ he recounts. ‘But then I looked close up at the Jewess’s face; I was sunk from that mood in a second. Because it struck me as a face of desperate sadness. Those are my own words. I stood as close to the painting as I could without touching it. Me a guard. I reached out then and touched the woman’s face. And I did not flinch back my hand or warn myself.’

Howard Norman’s protagonist would probably be able to pull himself back; this is a man who calms himself down by ironing endless white shirts. And he fully intends to keep the same job for the next 30 years. But those around him lack his instinct for order and seem to be pushing him toward the grand, self destructive gesture. News of Hitler’s advances on Europe also make him realize ‘how small Halifax had become.’ Imogen, too, feels her life a confinement, but her reaction is more extreme. She literally wills herself to become the woman in the painting. In one bizarre scene and Norman has a knack for turning the extreme into the everyday DeFoe finds her filling in for the usual museum guide. Speaking in an unconvincing Dutch accent and dressed as the Jewess, Imogen tells a group of increasingly puzzled women her version of events. ‘While he painted me, we fell in love. Just weeks before, with my parents’ death, I had become estranged from my very soul. My marriage to Joop Heijman helped me to reconcile. And now you know my deepest secrets.’ Edward’s as*sessment is as wry as ever, and spot on: ‘Life in Halifax used to be so simple, didn’t it, DeFoe?’

As Imogen’s identification grows, she is resolved to go to Amsterdam and ‘reunite’ with the painter. Howard Norman writes with such persuasive oddity that it’s no surprise when those closely allied to the Glace Museum find themselves moving this futile, intrusive, and dangerous plan along. The Museum Guard is an unsettling examination of a group of people with very odd names who let themselves get too close to art and perhaps to life. Kerry Fried

The Haunting of L

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’s life is about to change in ways he scarcely could have imagined. Across Canada, Linn has been arranging and photographing gruesome accidents for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. Radin Heur theirs is a macabre duet of art and violence. After a strenuous journey, Peter arrives in Churchill on the very night of his employer’s wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna’s brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Several months later, the uneasy menage a trois moves to Peter’s native Halifax. 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 as he sees more and 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.

Devotion

Fans of Howard Norman, the internationally acclaimed author of The Hunting of L and The Bird Artist and a two time National Book Award finalist, will find in his latest novel an intense and intriguingly unconventional love story all the hallmarks of this masterly writer: sparkling yet spare language, a totally compelling air of mystery spread over our workaday world, and ability to capture the metaphorical heartbeat at the center of our lives. Like many of Howard Norman’s celebrated novels, Devotion begins with an announcement of a crime: on August 19, 1985, David Kozol and his father in law engaged in assault by mutual affray. Norman sets out to explore a great mystery: why seemingly quiet, contained people lose control. David and Maggie’s story seemed straightforward enough; they met in a hotel lobby in London. For David, the simple fact was love at first sight. For Maggie, the attraction was similarly sudden and unprecedented in intensity. Their love affair, ‘A fugue state of amorous Devotion,’ turned into a whirlwind romance and marriage. So what could possibly enrage David enough that he would strike at the father of his new bride? Why would William, a gentle man who looks after an estate and its flock of swans in Nova Scotia, be so angry at the man who has just married his beloved only child, Maggie? And what would lead Maggie to believe that David has been unfaithful to her? In his signature style haunting and evocative Norman lays bare the inventive stupidities people are capable of when wounded and confused. At its core, Devotion is an elegantly constructed, never sentimental examination of love: romantic love and its flip side, hate, filial love at its most tender, and, of course, love for the vast open spaces of Nova Scotia.

What Is Left the Daughter

Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country’s finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L in this erotically charged and morally complex story. Seventeen year old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda. Setting in motion the novel s chain of life altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents including a German U boat s sinking of the Nova Scotia Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling lend intense narrative power to Norman s uncannily layered story. Wyatt s account of the astonishing not least to him events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty one years later. It s a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one. An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.

Northern Tales

With tales from the tribal peoples of Greenland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, Japan, and the polar region, told and retold during months long winter nights, Northern Tales gathers together a rich diversity of traditions and cultures, spanning the Way Back Time through the coming of the first white explorers. By turns tragic and comic, fantastic and earthy, frivolous and profound, this collection transports the reader to the haunting, little known world of the far North, with all its fragile majesty and power. 20080325

The Girl Who Dreamed Only Geese

Based on decades of research and extended collaboration with Inuit storytellers, award winning author Howard Norman’s masterful retellings of ten Inuit tales invite readers on a unique story journey from Siberia and Alaska to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. Dramatic illustrations inspired by stonecut art of the Inuit people capture the beauty and mystery of these stories as they carry us sometimes laughing, sometimes crying from village to village over taiga, tundra, snow plains, and the iceberg filled sea.

The Chauffeur

Bringing together eight previously published stories the bestselling author of The Bird Artist explores the lives of a range 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.

Between Heaven and Earth

For centuries birds and their magnificent ability to fly have inspired tales of mischief, mystery, and enchantment. In a collection that is as beautiful as it is timeless, award winning author Howard Norman and Caldecott medalists Leo and Diane Dillon offer five bird stories from around the world including one about an elusive bird that sings like a warthog and another about a much loved quail dying of thirst. This glorious collaboration is the perfect gift for any family library, a book that children and parents alike will treasure.

Trickster and the Fainting Birds

With spare grace & lively wit, acclaimed author Howard Norman offers readers seven Algonquian stories of the outrageous antics of the singular maverick called Trickster. When Trickster sets out walking, mischief is never far behind. Whether he is cheating in a sleepwalking contest, teaching the shut eye dance to ducks, or halting a wedding by transforming the groom into a kingfisher bird, Trickster sets the world askew. Tom Pohrt’s richly detailed paintings invite us to follow where Trickster leads across frozen lakes & thawing marshes, into ash storms & lightning singed tree stumps, on a journey that carries us from trouble, to laughter, & finally, to wisdom. Covers Cree & Ojibwa Indians. Story notes. Juvenile audiences.

My Famous Evening

An evocative portrait of the landscape and eccentric characters who have shaped his literary work by the critically acclaimed author of The Bird Artist and The Northern Lights captures the world of Nova Scotia in a collection of folklore, poetry, reflections, anecdotes, stories, and essays.

In Fond Remembrance of Me

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.