Join author Camille Hernández-Ramdwar of Suite As Sugar at the Toronto International Fesitval of Authors for a conversation with Christine Estima.
Christine Estima and Camille Hernández-Ramdwar will take the stage to discuss their new story collections, both tackling themes of legacy, family and the small tragedies and devastations that permeate our everyday lives.
In Hernández-Ramdwar’s Suite as Sugar, a myriad of perspectives, settings and unexpected narrators come together in an exploration of everything from colonialism to loss to the housing crisis. Meanwhile, Estima’s The Syrian Ladies Benevolent Society delves into the immigrant experience, blood-ethnicity and sexuality in a tapestry of voices from one woman’s family throughout the centuries.
Skilfully shifting perspectives, protagonists and time periods, two authors offer insight into their explosive debut collections and the stories that inspired them.
This event will be followed by a book signing.
For more information please visit: https://festivalofauthors.ca/event/casual-brutalities/
Suite As Sugar by Camille Hernández-Ramdwar
Suite as Sugar is a testimony to the unseen forces, always vigilant, ever ready, imbuing the characters in this collection with both resilience and trauma.
From Winnipeg winterscapes to Toronto’s condo culture, from Havana’s haunted streets to Trinidad’s calamitous environs, the stories in Suite as Sugar are permeated with the violence of colonial histories, personal and intimate, reflecting legacies of abandonment and loss. The veil between the living and the dead is obscured, chaos becomes panacea, and characters take drastic measures into their own hands.
Survivors of all kinds seek strategy and solace: a group of homeless people organize an occupation of vacant condos, a new resident to a disturbing neighbourhood tries to make sense of madness, a dog investigates the sudden disappearance of his owner. The five intertwined vignettes in the title story are set in a Caribbean country where the spectre of the sugar plantation haunts everyone. Tying this collection together is the casual brutality of our everyday lives, whether seen through the eyes of animal, spirit, or human being.
A RARE MACHINES BOOK