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Wendy MacIntyre
Wendy MacIntyre lives in Ottawa where she works as a freelance writer and editor. She has published scholarly essays and short fiction in journals in Canada, the United States, and Britain, including in the University of Windsor Review and the Malahat Review. Her novels are Mairi (Oolichan Books), The Applecross Spell (XYZ Publishing), and Apart (Groundwood Books), a young adult novel which was named one of the ten best picks for young adult fiction for 2007 by the Ontario Library Association .
Lucia's Masks
Lucia's Masks follows a group of six strangers who meet by chance while each one is fleeing the barbaric and thought-controlling totalitarian regime of The City. As they journey to the North, where they hope they can be free of the ever-present Eye and establish a free society, their individual stories are interwoven dexterously by author Wendy MacIntyre.
The principal voice belongs to Lucia. A sculptress and lover of art, Lucia is forced to clean office buildings for the regime and to hide her beloved potter's wheel from sight. When she finds her most precious possession destroyed, the final straw has been broken and Lucia flees The City. She takes with her a ball of potter's clay and a copy of the death mask of John Keats; both constant reminders in a desolate, art-starved world of the inherent power humankind possesses to create great beauty.
Lucia's companions on the road to freedom include: the Outpacer, a former extreme hedonist and philanderer who now hides his identity behind a monk's cowl; Bird Girl, a young woman constantly hunting for books as all but a few have been destroyed by the regime; Harry, an 88 year-old survivor of a society that detests the elderly; and Candace, a dominant individual whose repeated attempts to assume control creates one of the primary sources of tension in the novel.
In addition to battling forces of the regime, the group must confront their own minds which have become so contaminated by the world they long to escape that their own psyches threaten to become their most insurmountable obstacles. Then, one day, with the bickering and frailties increasing, they encounter an old box with six Greek tragedy masks inside. These masks, possessors of uncanny powers, are destined to be the key to their fortunes.
504 pages/trade paper
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Hunting Piero
This novel interweaves Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo's fifteenth-century viewpoint with the twenty-first-century reality of two young Canadian students: Agnes Vane, an art history major fascinated by di Cosimo's multi-layered imagery, and Peter (Pinto) Dervaig, a student of philosophy passionate about preventing cruelty to animals. Both Agnes and Pinto were marginalized in their adolescence because of their unusual appearance. Agnes has slightly simian features. Pinto is a huge man with a multihued skin pigmentation.
When Agnes, as a lonely and alienated child, discovers di Cosimo's empathetic paintings of animals and human-animal hybrids, she feels she is looked upon gently for the first time in her life. That moment influences her decision to become an animal rights activist, a commitment that ultimately brings her both anguish and insight. Her story is echoed by chapters from di Cosimo's perspective as he pits his solitary vision, of a golden age when animals did indeed speak, against the dictatorial grip in which Savonarola, destroyer of secular art and culture, holds the city of Florence.
Hunting Piero is the tale of a passionate moral quest, and equally, a story of redemption and of love tested by tragic missteps and their deadly consequences.