Dogs at the Perimeter - Tapa dura

A "Globe and Mail" Best Book "If you read one Canadian book this year, let it be this one."-- Johanna Skibsrud "The story is so compelling, the characters so authentic and the writing so fine that you race through intently... savouring every page." -- Montreal "Gazette" "The beauty of Madeleine Thien's prose doesn't reside only in its clarity and elegance. She's a surveyor of damaged lives. Thien, a deeply empathetic writer, enfolds her wounded creations in morally precise language, offering the consolation of, in effect, storytelling." -- "Globe and Mail" "This book is as powerful as history, as magical as myth, and a light shining on one of the darkest chapters of modern history." -- Alice Pung, author of "Unpolished Gem" "Thien once again demonstrates a talent for creating vivid, indelible images in language both precise and lyrical...there is a confidence in Thien's writing that many more accomplished authors never attain." -- "Quill & Quire" "Dogs at the Perimeter is a novel of quiet and breathtaking beauty.... Thien opens up the hearts of her characters with a precision that is deeply humane, peeling apart, page by page, the secrets they keep from themselves." -- Jury citation, Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction (shortlist) "The strife in Indo--China has inspired some astonishing writing in recent decades, both fiction and non--fiction. Dogs at the Perimeter belongs with the best of such works. But it also tells a more universal story about being borne back into the past -- and the inescapability of history." -- "The Economist" "Dogs at the Perimeter explores the aftermath of war with a quiet power. . . . This is a beautiful, deeply moving novel that addresses universal questions." -- "The Independent" "Extremely moving and honest while maintaining lyricism and beautifully balanced prose..." -- A. L. Kennedy "Fiction like this, clear--eyed and tru

2005: In the midst of a cold Montreal winter, a Cambodian woman, known only to us as 'Janie', separates from her husband and son. She takes refuge in the apartment of her friend, the neurologist Hiroji Matsui, but one day he leaves the Brain Research Centre where they are both employed and disappears into the night...We journey back thirty years from the moment of his vanishing to Janie as a young girl in Phnom Penh, where Cambodia is ruled by the brutal Khmer Rouge. People are seized in the night, families are torn apart, and hunger is everywhere. Helped by a defector, Janie escapes by sea, and arrives in Canada as a refugee. In Montreal, she meets Hiroji - whose brother James, a Red Cross doctor, disappeared in Cambodia in 1975 - and who, like Janie, is haunted by the many lives we carry within ourselves, and the unwieldy shards of history that we make efforts to displace, but fail to extinguish. Weaving together these fragments in clean, luminous prose, Dogs at the Perimeter is a remarkable, unparalleled map of the mind's battle with memory, loss, and the unspeakable horrors of war.