The Company We Keep, Frances Itani
The Company We Keep, Frances Itani
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The Company We Keep
A Novel

Author: Frances Itani

Narrator: Elizabeth Wiley

Unabridged: 9 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/18/2020

Categories: Fiction, Women, Friendship


Synopsis

On Tuesday nights in the backroom of Cassie’s café, six strangers seek solace and find themselves part of a “Company of Good Cheer” Hazzley is at loose ends, even three years after the death of her husband. When her longtime friend Cassandra, café owner and occasional dance-class partner, suggests that she start up a conversation group, Hazzley posts a notice on the community board at the local grocery store. Four people turn up for the first meeting: Gwen, a recently widowed retiree in her early sixties, who finds herself pet-sitting a cantankerous parrot; Chiyo, a forty-year-old fitness instructor who cared for her unyielding but gossip-loving mother through the final days of her life; Addie, a woman pre-emptively grieving a close friend who is seriously ill; and Tom, an antiques dealer and amateur poet who, deprived of home baking since becoming a widower, comes to the first meeting hoping cake will be served. Before long, they are joined by Allam, a Syrian refugee with his own story to tell. These six strangers are learning that beginnings can be possible at any stage of life. But as they tell their stories, they must navigate what is shared and what is withheld. Which version of the truth will be revealed? Who is prepared to step up when help is needed? This moving, funny and deeply empathic new novel from acclaimed author Frances Itani reminds us that life, with all its twists and turns, never loses its capacity to surprise.

About Frances Itani

FRANCES ITANI has written eighteen books. Her novels include That’s My Baby; Tell, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Requiem, chosen by the Washington Post as one of the top fiction titles of 2012; Remembering the Bones, published internationally and shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; and the #1 bestseller Deafening, which won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Published in seventeen territories, Deafening was also selected for CBC’s Canada Reads. A three-time winner of the CBC Literary Prize, Frances Itani is a Member of the Order of Canada and the recipient of a 2019 Library and Archives Canada Scholars Award. She lives in Ottawa.


Reviews

Goodreads review by NILTON

Well... this book is beautifully written, there is no doubt about it, and for that alone I would have rated it 5 stars. I guess that’s why it was mentioned for the 2020’s Scotiabank Giller Prize. But unfortunately this one did not touch me in any level. This book is about coping with grieving. That’......more

Goodreads review by Wendy

This book, by a Canadian author, is set in Canada and contemporarily in the fall of 2018. It is the most precious and insightful book I have read regarding bereavement, and I have read many many books about bereavement as I have been widowed twice already in my 72 years and just last February, I los......more

Goodreads review by Susan

I needed a book like this. The right book at the right time. I found it to be both well written (as Itani's books always are) and also comforting on a variety of levels. This is a book about grief and loss and this is a time all of us are experiencing both because of COVID. By telling the stories of......more

Goodreads review by Rose

This book hooked me right away, with its Chapter One description of a woman determinedly emptying (“down-sizing”) her house with the help of the burly guys in the Re-Store truck. All six main characters, a cross-section of ages and genders, are wonderfully imagined, as is Rico the parrot (you’ll jus......more