Garbo Laughs

Front Cover
McClelland & Stewart, Aug 27, 2010 - Fiction - 384 pages
Winner of the Ottawa Book Award
Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award
A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year
A Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year


Elizabeth Hay’s runaway national bestseller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet’s Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.

From inside the book

Contents

Section 1
6
Section 2
16
Section 3
22
Section 4
43
Section 5
46
Section 6
50
Section 7
67
Section 8
77
Section 15
136
Section 16
141
Section 17
163
Section 18
188
Section 19
192
Section 20
203
Section 21
224
Section 22
265

Section 9
86
Section 10
93
Section 11
95
Section 12
106
Section 13
121
Section 14
130
Section 23
300
Section 24
336
Section 25
367
Section 26
375
Copyright

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About the author (2010)

ELIZABETH HAY is the Giller Prize-winning author of six novels, including Late Nights on Air, His Whole Life, and A Student of Weather. Her memoir All Things Consoled won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction; her story collection Small Change was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. A former radio broadcaster, she spent a number of years in Mexico and New York City, and makes her home in Ottawa.

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