Marina Endicott

Marina Endicott began her career as an actor and director in Toronto and London, England, where she started to write fiction. Her debut novel, Open Arms, was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Her second, Good to a Fault, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada/Caribbean), was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was a 2010 CBC Canada Reads selection. Her next, The Little Shadows, was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, as was her last book, Close to Hugh. Endicott lives in Edmonton, where she teaches at the University of Alberta.

Website: marinaendicott.com
Twitter: @marinaendicott

A sweet-natured but sharp-eyed and quick-tongued social observer in the Jane Austen/Barbara Pym/Anne Tyler tradition, who can wring love, revulsion and hilarity in a single page.” — T.F. Rigelhof, The Globe and Mail

FESTIVAL BOOK

The Difference

The Difference is a breathtaking tour-de-force by one of Canada’s most celebrated authors, a writer with the astonishing ability to bring a past world to vivid life while revealing the moral complexity of our own.

What is the difference between ourselves and other humans? Between human and animal? Where does that difference persist in our minds? These are the questions Marina Endicott explores in this sweeping novel set on the Morning Light, a ship from Nova Scotia sailing the South Pacific in 1912. Thea and Kay are half-sisters, separated in age by more than a decade. After the death of their stern father, head of a residential school in western Canada, the elder sister, Thea, returns east for her long-awaited marriage to the captain of the ship. She cannot abandon her younger sister, so Kay joins her, and together they embark on fateful voyage around the world.

Taking inspiration from the true story of a small boy who was brought on board a Canadian sailing ship in the South Seas, Endicott shows us a vanished world in all its wildness and wonder, and its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty too.