The brilliant debut novel by Helen Weinzweig, one of the first feminist writers in Canada and the award-winning author of Basic Black With Pearls.

In Helen Weinzweig's brilliant debut novel, a wedding reception becomes a gothic dream. The bride is not all she seems and there is something ambiguous about the groom - and just about everyone else at the surreal and strangely moving wedding.

Like a piece of music, Passing Ceremony is composed of brief, suggestive fragments that grow into a tightly integrated whole. There are bits of real and imagined conversation; polite dialogues that slide into mad comic banality; and scenes that could be quiet nightmares out of Borges. A satire and a rueful meditation on the ways people hurt one another, Weinzweig gives us a world suspended in time, an uneasy territory of the soul, which we all inhabit.

This edition features a new introduction by Jim Polk.

About the Author
HELEN WEINZWEIG is the author of the novels Passing Ceremony and Basic Black with Pearls, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her short story collection, A View from the Roof, was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. Helen Weinzweig died in Toronto in 2010.

Reviews
A remarkable piece of writing. * Toronto Star *
Polished, forceful, and poetic. * Ottawa Citizen *
Handled with skill. * Chatelaine *
A brilliant first work of fiction. * Edmonton Journal *
[Passing Ceremony] crackles with the energy of chance. Its form seems built from mysterious, unconscious forces . . . As a whole, the powerful novel resembles a shattered reflection in a mirror, each page a different-sized shard of a splintered psyche . . . There's a reason people are returning to [Helen Weinzweig's] work now. Her art was committed to unshackling us from the illusion of any form of certainty - to keeping the unknown, unknown. * Literary Review of Canada *



Book Information
ISBN 9781487002602
Author Helen Weinzweig
Format Paperback
Page Count 128
Imprint House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
Publisher House of Anansi Press Ltd ,Canada
Weight(grams) 181g
Dimensions(mm) 215mm * 139mm * 7mm