The Girl from Dream City tells the vivid story of Montreal writer Linda Leith’s literary life.
It’s the life that many young women dream of: education in some of Europe’s most beautiful cities before becoming a novelist, essayist, translator and literary curator.
Writing in the Time of Nationalism: From Two Solitudes to Blue Metropolis goes back in time to the days when Hugh MacLennan’s Two Solitudes was an international success, and when Mavis Gallant, Brian Moore, and Mordecai Richler were starting out in Montreal in the 1940s and 1950s.
Marrying Hungary is the moving story of a young woman who marries a Hungarian refugee. It is a glimpse into a life spent among foreigners, a tale of identity and eventual independence. And it reveals what few memoirs reveal: what brings a couple together, what marriage means to an ambitious and accomplished woman, and why sometimes even a good marriage eventually fails.
Hugh MacLennan’s classic “novel of Canada” was a publishing phenomenon when it was published in New York in 1945, though it is seldom read today. Linda Leith revisits the novel in the wake of the massive social changes that shook Quebec and Canada in the latter half of the twentieth century.
The Girl from Dream City:
A Literary Life
University of Regina Press.
ISBN 978-0-889777-85-9. 280 pages. $21.95.
April 2021.
You can order your copy here.
“I cannot imagine writing without references and allusions to other writers. My work, like my world, is full of writers.”
— Linda Leith, The Girl from Dream City