Amanda Hale

The woman is flying in small airplane and sees in the distance the great cumbrous mass of El Yunque, the flat-topped mesa that announces the historic town of Baracoa. She has likely heard the legend of the Honey River, where it is said that the person who bathes in its waters and gets married in Baracoa must stay there forever. She knows people in Baracoa. She is going to meet Onaldo, her Afro-Cuban lover, and she will become ‘Katrina’ to continue her private journals. In this series of linked fictions, unified by place and a cast of overlapping characters, Karina travels the length of El Caimán, the alligator which is Cuba.

The narratives that make up this book have their origins in Hale’s travel journal, but emerge as stories, arriving at that place just beyond creative non-fiction. Vivid and sensitive portraits are balanced with the dark undercurrents of Cuban life. Katrina witnesses how politics have re-shaped the culture and lives of the people she encounters, while she falls deeply in love with the true and hidden life of El Caimán.

My Sweet Curiosity tells the story of Natalya, a young medical student, too smart for her own good, who twists an already complicated genetic background rooted in the Romanov family into an impossible fantasy of reproductive technology which ultimately reveals its own strange truth. Talya falls in love with Dai Ling, a cello student of extraordinary talent, and daughter of Jia Song Xiang, doctor of traditional Chinese medicine.

Set in modern day Toronto, the story ventures into Renaissance Europe, looking over the shoulder of Andreas Vesalius as he opens the body and maps it accurately for the first time; to Beijing where Dai Ling’s parents meet and emigrate before the Tianenmen Square massacre; to Palestine, following Vesalius on his pilgrimage; to the deathbed of Talya’s mother in a Geneva cancer clinic.

My Sweet Curiosity explores the border between fact and fiction, the relation between medical science and music, and the enduring mysteries of the human body.

• Long-listed for the 2010 ReLit Award for Fiction

The Reddening Path is the story of Paméla who, adopted as an infant by Hannah & Fern, a Toronto lesbian couple, travels to Guatamala to search for her birth mother. Her quest uncovers a tangle of political and romantic intrigue as Paméla discovers her Mayan heritage and learns about the complexities of life in Guatemala. Resonating throughout is an account of Malintzín, the Mayan slave who became Cortes’ mistress. These details of the Spanish conquest weave throughout the narrative, colouring the lives of everyone she encounters in her birthland. Paméla’s journey casts light on the struggle between conqueror and conquered within the Guatemalan people and the spiritual and emotional complexities facing those of mixed blood, a reality which challenges her expectations for an easy resolution to her question of identity.

The Reddening Path is cleverly structured, with a style that fluctuates between dreamlike poetic imagery and a traditional quest-for-identity narrative...Hale's novel is an intriguing look at post-colonial biculturalism set against a moving backdrop of familial love and personal enlightenment.— Laurel Smith, Quill & Quire (June 2007)

A powerful and well-written novel.
— George Szanto

If you wish to know the tragic history of Guatemala and of Latin America from the time of the conquistadores, read this compelling novel.
— Rosemary Sullivan