Claudia Casper began her career as a novelist brilliantly in 1996. Her debut novel, The Reconstruction, was an international best seller, published, after a bidding war, by Penguin in Canada, the U.S., U.K. and Germany. The Globe and Mail described the writing as “beautiful, with passages of dazzling poetic intensity on nearly every page.”
The novel presents a sculptor contracted to build a life-size model of the hominid Lucy, the ancestral link to the primate world, at a time when she must also reconstruct her own life after the end of a loveless marriage, and Casper develops all the rich implications and suggestive parallels of this situation. She also initiates an idea that will recur in her novels, that we need to place ourselves in history to make sense of our existence.
Casper’s subsequent novels have also won immediate recognition. The Continuation of Love by Other Means (2003), exploring gender conflict in a relationship between a right-leaning father and his left wing daughter in Argentina during the Dirty War, was short-listed for the Ethel Wilson BC Book Prize. Her third novel, The Mercy Journals (2016), won the Philip K. Dick Award, an American prize for the best science fiction novel of the year published in paperback. It depicts a veteran of the Third World War in 2046 with PTSD in “a world in which the surreal, bizarre, and beautiful begin to triumph via character redemption and hope.”
Casper lives in Vancouver with her husband James Griffin, founder and president of the Vancouver Film School, and is currently co-writing a screenplay of The Reconstruction for a 3D feature film.
Casper will read at the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre at 8 p.m., Saturday, April 28. Admission is by donation, courtesy of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council.
– Submitted by Dick Harrison
