Book to Big Screen: Atonement
by Ian McEwan

May 11, 2011
6 p.m.–8 p.m.: Film screening
8 p.m.–9 p.m.: Discussion

York Amphitheatre (EV 1.605)
Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Integrated Complex
1515 Ste. Catherine St. W., Montreal

Join Concordia and McGill University alumni to explore how the Man Booker Prize-nominated novel Atonement by Ian McEwan was adapted into Joe Wright's award-winning film of the same name. Watch the film and then discuss the adaptation.

Get a 20% discount off regular price at the Concordia Bookstore.

Learn more on the Alumni Event Calendar

The Turn of the Screw / The Others
by Henry James

December 1, 2010 - Join fellow Concordia and McGill University alumni and explore how the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James was adapted into Alejandro Amenábar's award-winning film The Others. Watch the film and then participate in a discussion about the adaptation. Remember to read the book first!

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, first published in 1898, is told mainly through the journal of a governess and depicts her struggle to save her two young charges from the demonic influence of the eerie apparitions of former servants.

The Others is a 2001 psychological horror film by Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar that won eight Goya Awards (Spain's national film awards), including Best Film and Best Director. Starring Nicole Kidman, it tells the story of a woman who moves with her two small children to an English manor house during the Second World War while awaiting her husband’s return from battle.

Alumni Event Calendar

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
by Lucette Lagnado

A vivid, heartbreaking, and powerful inversion of the American dream, Lucette Lagnado's unforgettable memoir is a sweeping story of family, faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph set against the stunning backdrop of Cairo, Paris, and New York.

Winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and hailed by the New York Times Book Review as a "brilliant, crushing book" and the New Yorker as a memoir of ruin "told without melodrama by its youngest survivor," The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit recounts the exile of the author's Jewish Egyptian family from Cairo in 1963 and her father's heroic and tragic struggle to survive his "riches to rags" trajectory.

Alumni Event Calendar

Little Bee
by Chris Cleave

Little Bee is a powerful story of reconciliation and healing, but it is mixed in with a generous helping of satire about the daily difficulties of modern life.

This is a novel about important issues, from refugee policy to the devastating effects of violence, but more than that, it does something only great fiction can: Little Bee teaches us what it is like to live through experiences most of us think of only as far off disasters in the news.

Alumni Event Calendar

The Sweet Hereafter
by Russell Banks

When fourteen children from the small town of Sam Dent are lost in a tragic accident, its citizens are confronted with one of life s most difficult and disturbing questions: When the worst happens, whom do you blame, and how do you cope? Masterfully written, it is a large-hearted novel that brings to life a cast of unforgettable small-town characters and illuminates the mysteries and realities of love as well as grief.

The Sweet Hereafter was released as a major motion picture by Atom Egoyan in 1997 and won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Egoyan also received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay that year.

Sarah's Key
by Tatiana de Rosnay

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel d Hiv roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel' d'Hiv's 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Author Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.

Brooklyn
by Colm Toibin

It is Enniscorthy in the southeast of Ireland in the early 1950s. Eilis Lacey is one among many of her generation who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady s intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation.

Slowly, however, the pain of parting is buried beneath the rhythms of her new life until she begins to realize that she has found a sort of happiness. As she falls in love, news comes from home that forces her back to Enniscorthy, not to the constrictions of her old life, but to new possibilities which conflict deeply with the life she has left behind in Brooklyn.

In the quiet character of Eilis Lacey, Colm Tóibín has created one of fiction s most memorable heroines and in Brooklyn, a luminous novel of devastating power. Tóibín demonstrates once again his astonishing range and that he is a true master of nuanced prose, emotional depth, and narrative virtuosity.

The Space Between Us
by Thrity Umrigar

Poignant, evocative, and unforgettable, The Space Between Us is an intimate portrait of a distant yet familiar world. Set in modern-day India, it is the story of two compelling and achingly real women: Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife whose opulent surroundings hide the shame and disappointment of her abusive marriage, and Bhima, a stoic illiterate hardened by a life of despair and loss, who has worked in the Dubash household for more than twenty years. A powerful and perceptive literary masterwork, author Thrity Umrigar's extraordinary novel demonstrates how the lives of the rich and poor are intrinsically connected yet vastly removed from each other, and how the strong bonds of womanhood are eternally opposed by the divisions of class and culture.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short-story collections of our time.

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Includes the short story "Brokeback Mountain" which would later be adapted into an Oscar-winning feature film.

Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones

After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda's island, only one white person stays behind. Mr. Watts, whom the kids call Pop Eye, wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley, and he steps in to teach the children when there is no one else. His only lessons consist of reading from his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr. Dickens.

For Matilda, Dickens's hero Pip becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. Soon Mr. Watts's book begins to inflame the children's imaginations with dreams about Dickens's London and the larger world. But how will they answer when the soldiers demand to know: where is this man named Pip?

Set against the stunning beauty of Bougainville in the South Pacific during the civil war in the early 1990s, Lloyd Jones's breathtaking novel shows what magic a child's imagination makes possible even in the face of terrible violence and what power stories have to fuel the imagination.

The Leisure Economy
How Changing Demographics, Economics, and Generational Attitudes Will Reshape Our Lives and Our Industries
by Linda Nazareth

For the past three decades, we have been steadily creating an extreme 'time-crunch economy' that has affected jobs, portfolios, businesses and lives. But the 'time-crunch economy' is turning into 'the leisure economy' and it will mean wrenching adjustments for our lives and institutions. Everyone from consumers, investors, businesses, and policy-makers will need to understand the changes afoot.

The Leisure Economy posits profound economic changes in North America due to both the retirement of the baby boomers and the attitudes of ascendant generations X and Y. Looking at trends in demographics, economics and generational change, this book looks at how to stay ahead of the leisure economy and predicts who will be the winners and losers in the seismic shift ahead.

Girl In A Blue Dress
by Gaynor Arnold

The celebrated debut novel inspired by the life and marriage of Charles Dickens.

Alfred Gibson's funeral is taking place at Westminster Abbey, and his wife of twenty years, Dorothea, has not been invited. The Great Man's will favours his children and a clandestine mistress over the woman he sent away when their youngest child was still an infant.

Dorothea hasn't left her small apartment for years, and accepts her exclusion until an invitation to a private audience with Queen Victoria arrives. The exhilaration of finding that she has much in common with the most powerful woman in England spurs Dorothea to examine her own life more closely. Her recollections uncover deviousness and the frighteningly hypnotic power of the genius she married, but also raise questions about her own complicity in her unhappiness. Questions that finally compel her to face her grown-up children and the two women she has long felt stole her husband: her own younger sister, Sissy, and the charming actress, Miss Ricketts.

This remarkable debut is as wise in the ways of the human heart as it is witty and vivid in its depiction of the charismatic Alfred Gibson, and the habits, mores, and personalities of Victorian London.

Away From Her
by Alice Munro

Away From Her is a stunning collection of nine short stories that deal with the substance of adult life. They draw us immediately into that special place known as 'Alice Munro Territory' where an unexpected twist or a suddenly recaptured memory can trace the arc of an entire life.

The title short story "Away from Her" - in which an aging couple's relationship is tested as the woman develops Alzheimer's disease and forgets her long years of marriage - is now a critically acclaimed motion picture by Sarah Polley.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Diaz

The most talked about - and praised - first novel of 2007, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who - from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister - dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú - a curse that has haunted Oscar's family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating D ominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere - and risk it all - in the name of love.

The White Tiger
by Aravind Adiga

Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen.

Sold in sixteen countries around the world, The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation -- and a startling, provocative debut.