Novels
- Elephant Winter (1997)
- Dagmar’s Daughter (1999)
- The Disappeared (2009)
- Under the Visible Life (2015)
- Speak, Silence (2021)
Collections
Non fiction
- To Arrive Where You Are (2000)
- Elizabeth Smart (2004)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Kim Echlin Books Overview
Elephant Winter
With the compassion of Gorillas in the Mist, Kim Echlin’s thought provoking debut evokes the beauty of nature and animals and the pain and triumph that comes with human understanding of it. Summoned home from Zimbabwe, Sophie Walker has returned to southern Ontario to nurse her dying mother. Her mother’s farm borders on a tacky tourist spot called ‘Safari, ‘ and across from the kitchen window Sophie sees a herd of the immense Asian elephants playing in the snow. When the elephant keeper invites her to join in caring for the herd, she discovers a new human animal relationship by recording and playing back the infrasound rumblings, bellows, and trumpets of the elephants. As she and her mother try to decode an Elephant English dictionary, Sophie slowly uncovers an elephant culture, one which simultaneously honors the herd and the individual with Zen like acceptance.
The Disappeared
After more than 30 years Anne Greves feels compelled to break her silence about her first lover, and a treacherous pursuit across Cambodia’s killing fields. Once she was a motherless girl from taciturn immigrant stock. Defying fierce opposition, she falls in love with Serey, a gentle rebel and exiled musician. She’s still only 16 when he leaves her in their Montreal flat to return to Cambodia And, after a decade without word, she abandons everything to search for him in the bars of Phnom Penh, a city traumatized by the Khmer Rouge slaughter. Against all odds the lovers are reunited, and in a political country where tranquil rice paddies harbour the bones of the massacred, Anne pieces together a new life with Serey. But there are wounds that love cannot heal, and some mysteries too dangerous to know. And when Serey disappears again, Anne discovers a story she cannot bear. Haunting, vivid, elegiac, The Disappeared is a tour de force; at once a battle cry and a piercing lamentation, for truth, for love.
To Arrive Where You Are
The Creative Non Fiction and Cultural Journalism program at The Banff Centre allows writers a freedom they don’t have in their everyday lives. Freedom to choose their own destinations. Freedom to arrive at some surprising places. The results of these literary travels are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always thought provoking. This is the third installment in the Banff Centre Press’s cultural journalism series.
Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, has long been seen as a woman determined by ‘Romantic’ love. In this suggestive new look at her life, Kim Echlin shows that another and powerful source of her creativity was rooted in her fearless exploration of the female body and psyche as daughter, lover of men and women, and mother of four children. Elizabeth Smart bucked tradition from the beginning. She left her bourgeois diplomatic circles in Ottawa to join bohemian artists in England, France and Mexico. When she fell in love with a British poet and became pregnant by him, she had her first baby in secret on the west coast of Canada and wrote the book that describes not only a love affair but a searing cycle of betrayal that leads to a woman’s new self assertion. Through art and having a baby, Elizabeth Smart discovered both her voice and her autonomy outside of convention. The daring and pain and elusive moments of joy in this extraordinary life are told through Elizabeth Smart s diaries, poetry and prose. Echlin brings new material to bear on this reflection including a hundred interviews with family, friends and work colleagues, as well as never before seen letters in which Smart reflects on birth and female creativity. She highlights Elizabeth Smart s unwavering commitment to writing in a voice and aesthetic form that reflects authentic female experience.
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