About this Event
A gorgeous, Gothic, Romany coming of age story that explores the lives of migrant workers in Southern Ontario’s tobacco belt—with a dash of magic realism.
Zelda is a young, isolated woman who rejects her Romany identity and her family’s poverty. Longing for glamour and riches and freedom, Zelda is lured away from working in the tobacco fields alongside her mother and aunts and other migrant workers when she meets
Trixie Tormentine, who hires Zelda as an assistant and good-luck charm.
What starts out as a summer of ease and access to the unfettered wealth of the Tormentines—Trixie’s husband Jack owns the tobacco farm that employes Zelda’s family and friends—unspools into dangerous displays of power and manipulation. One of the Romany family’s puppets, grandmother Puri Dai, acts as Zelda’s confidante and mentor, and warns her about the devil of the tobacco fields, a harbinger of destruction.
Lynn Hutchinson Lee is an award-winning author of of Anglo-Romany descent on her father's side. Her short fiction was published in Room, Wagtail: The Roma Women’s Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere. An excerpt from Nightshade won first prize in the 2022 Joy Kogawa Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the 2022 Swedish Writers’ Festival Prize. In 2023, Nightshade was shortlisted for the Guernica Prize. Her flash fiction won the Editors’ Choice Award in Guernica's This Will Only Take a Minute. Her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens is published with Stelliform Press. Lynn lives in Toronto.
Leigh Nash is the publisher at Assembly Press, and in the past has been the publisher at House of Anansi Press and Invisible Publishing. She co-runs the PEP Rally Reading Series out of Books & Company in Picton and co-founded The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. She is the author of Goodbye, Ukulele and several chapbooks. Leigh also very occasionally read tarot cards in Prince Edward County, Ontario.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Another Story Bookshop, 315 Roncesvalles Avenue, Toronto, Canada
CAD 0.00
