{"product_id":"fall-on-your-knees","title":"Fall on Your Knees","description":"Used paperback in Good condition. “What a wild ride — I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced \u003cb\u003eFall on Your Knees\u003c\/b\u003e as her February 2002 Book Club selection. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national bestseller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters — beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden; and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite — forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of \u003cb\u003eFall on Your Knees\u003c\/b\u003e contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, “giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed” (\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review).\u003c\/i\u003e As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The book’s epigraph, taken from \u003cb\u003eWuthering Heights\u003c\/b\u003e, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey towards tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e The \u003ci\u003eSunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e wrote, \"It is the unpredictability of this huge book that is its greatest joy.\" With allusions ranging from Hollywood stars to religious tracts, \u003cb\u003eFall on Your Knees\u003c\/b\u003e simmers with vibrancy and crackling, effervescent, breathtaking language.","brand":"Macdonald, Ann-Marie","offers":[{"title":"Good","offer_id":53818910474523,"sku":"mon0000798574","price":9.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0958\/4004\/3291\/files\/9898683482328.jpg?v=1787684758","url":"https:\/\/bookalley.com\/products\/fall-on-your-knees","provider":"Book Alley","version":"1.0","type":"link"}