Notes from the Writing Game: The Violets of Usambara Arrives! (Or Should it Be "Arrive?)

The first books arrived about 4:30 p.m. yesterday, and I can’t say how relieved I was. We’re having the first launch of The Violets of Usambara next Tuesday (6 p.m., Paragraphe Books, Sherbrooke and McGill College) but when I talked to the publisher’s office a couple of days ago, the books hadn’t arrived from the printer. I had visions of the incredible Marc Côté, Cormorant’s soul, getting on the train from Toronto next week with several boxes of late-arriving books. But it appears that all is well.

Yes, all is well. I feel particularly good about the quote that Antanas Sileika, a fine writer himself and head of the Humber College creative writing program, gave us to put on the jacket cover:

“Mary Soderstrom’s Violets of Usambara is a moving novel that explores the possibility of redemption in a morally complex world. Cutting between Canada and tension-filled Burundi, it has echoes of Graham Greene both in setting and tone, but it is above all Soderstrom’s intelligent investigation of power and its absence and love over the lifetime of a marriage.”

It is so nice when people you respect understand what you’re trying to do.