After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire ― to make his wife happy ― leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.
Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of a community through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up this city ― bisected by railway lines and rivers, connected by boulevards and back alleys ― are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit ― this place of memory, amnesia, longing, and belonging.
Featuring a cast of eclectic characters, Once More With Feeling is about a community, about a family, and about the way time makes fond fools of us all. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.
Praise
“Méira Cook has written a fine and funny novel that, like the city in which it is set, pulses with life, love, loss, and so much more. Vital and vivid characters spring from the page, grab your heart, and won’t let go.” Terry Fallis, Two-Time Winner of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour.
“Brimming with warmth and a wry, often surrealistic sense of humour, Cook’s vibrant narrative delves beneath the tenuous surfaces of the everyday, asking us to re-examine the ways in which we see ourselves and understand the world.” Kerry Lee Powell, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush.
Awards
Winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award
Excerpt