Novels
- Leaning, Leaning Over Water (1998)
- Deafening (2003)
- Remembering the Bones (2007)
- Requiem (2011)
- Tell (2015)
- That’s My Baby (2017)
- The Company We Keep (2020)
Collections
- A Season of Mourning (1988)
- Truth or Lies (1989)
- Pack Ice (1989)
- Man Without Face (1994)
- Poached Egg on Toast (2004)
Picture Books
- Best Friend Trouble (2014)
Novellas
- Missing (2011)
- Listen! (2012)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
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Novellas Book Covers
Frances Itani Books Overview
Deafening
Deafening is a tale of remarkable virtuosity and power. At the age of five, Grania the daughter of hardworking hoteliers in small town Ontario emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf, and is suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. Her mother cannot accept her daughter’s deafness, so Grania’s indefatigable grandmother tries to teach her language from the inside out. But when it becomes clear that Grania can no longer thrive in the world of the hearing, her family sends her to live at the Ontario School for the Deaf where she learns sign language and speech. After graduation Grania stays on to work at the school, and it is there that she meets Jim Lloyd, a hearing man. In wonderment the two begin to create a new emotional vocabulary that encompas*ses both sound and silence. But two weeks after their wedding, Jim must leave to serve as a stretcher bearer on the blood soaked battlefields of Flanders. During the war, Jim and Grania’s letters both real and imagined attempt to sustain their intimacy, even while they are both pulled into cataclysmic events that will alter the world forever.
Remembering the Bones
Itani’s writing is merely breathtaking. NewsdayThe new novel from the award winning author of Deafening is a poignant exploration of one eighty year old life, as its hero*ine lies at the bottom of a ravine where she has crashed en route to visit the queen. Born the same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian Georgina Danforth Witley is one of ninety nine privileged Commonwealth subjects invited to an eightieth birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. All she has to do is drive to the airport and board the plane for London. Except that Georgie drives off the road, her car plunging into a thickly wooded ravine. Thrown from the car and unable to move, she must rely on her no nonsense wit, her full store of family memories, and a recitation of the bones in her body a childhood exercise that reminds her she is still alive. As Georgina lies helpless, she reflects on her role as a daughter, mother, sister, wife, and widow on lost loves and painful secrets offering a whimsical and profound insight into the life of one ordinary woman who, while drawing on her instincts to survive, asks herself: what has it all amounted to?
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