Far to Go
Nominated for the Man Booker Prize ~ Winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award ~ Winner of the Wordsworthy Award
Top 10 Book of 2010 Toronto Star ~ Top 10 Book of 2010 NOW magazine ~ Nominated for Canada Reads Best Book of the Decade
Praise for Far to Go
“A winner.”
--NOW magazine
“A page-turner.”
--Toronto Star
“Fast-paced, suspenseful, moving, and unique…”
--Winnipeg Free Press
“Intimate and strangely lovely …extraordinary.”
--Daily Mail
“Clean, crisp, and unencumbered.”
--Globe and Mail
“Pick’s gorgeous writing is to be savoured.”
--Quill & Quire
“An intriguing experiment in the art of storytelling.”
--Montreal Gazette
“A punch to the gut.”
--The Walrus
“A potential classic in the making.”
--Financial Times
Longlisted for the 2011 MAN BOOKER PRIZE for Fiction, FAR TO GO is a powerful and profoundly moving story about one family’s epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy.
Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are affluent, secular Jews, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of the German forces in Czechoslovakia. Desperate to avoid deportation, the Bauers flee to Prague with their six-year-old son, Pepik, and his beloved nanny, Marta. When the family try to flee without her to Paris, Marta betrays them to her Nazi boyfriend. But it is through Marta’s determination that Pepik secures a place on a Kindertransport, though he never sees his parents or Marta again.
Inspired by Alison Pick’s own grandparents who fled their native Czechoslovakia for Canada during the Second World War, FAR TO GO is a deeply personal and emotionally harrowing novel.
Between Gods
Shortlisted for BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction ~ Globe and Mail Best Book of 2014 ~ CBC Best Book of 2014
Shortlisted for the Wingate Literary Prize
Praise for Between Gods
“Incredibly beautiful, original and poetic.”
--Mireille Silcoff, author of Chez L’Arabe
“A courageous and heart-opening journey, exquisitely told.”
--Vancouver Sun
“A page-turner of a book…humorous, personal and engaging.”
--BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction jury
“...an unflinching, courageous memoir... the author's skill at storytelling and knack for cliche-fee description are undeniable. Sentences are lean, evocative, and raw with detail.”
--Quill & Quire
“Between Gods is that rare memoir I couldn't put down; brilliantly well written... profoundly moving... a beautifully woven story of family, partnership, love and reconciliation not just with one’s past but with oneself.”
--A.M. Homes, Winner of the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction
“There is sometimes a document of private life so thrilling in its subjectivity that it shuts you right up. Alison Pick’s Between Gods is such a book.”
--The Globe and Mail
“Pick’s writing ability and keen intellect ensure she’s able to navigate such delicate, complex subject matter with compassion and clarity.”
--Toronto Star
Alison Pick was born in the 1970s and raised in a supportive, loving family. She grew up laughing with her sister and cousins, and doting on her grandparents. Then as a teenager, Alison made a discovery that instantly changed her understanding of her family, and her vision for her own life, forever. She learned that her Pick grandparents, who had escaped from the Czech Republic during WWII, were Jewish--and that most of this side of the family had died in concentration camps. She also discovered that her own father had not known of this history until, in his twenties, he had a chance encounter with an old family friend--and then he, too, had kept the secret from Alison and her sister.
In her early thirties, engaged to be married to her longtime boyfriend but struggling with a crippling depression, Alison slowly but doggedly began to research and uncover her Jewish heritage. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward was to reclaim her history and indentity as a Jew. But even then, one seemingly insurmountable problem remained: her mother wasn't Jewish, so technically Alison wasn't either. In this by times raw, by times sublime memoir, Alison recounts her struggle with the meaning of her faith, her journey to convert to Judaism, her battle with depression, and her path towards facing and accepting the past and embracing the future--including starting a new family of her own. This is her unusual and gripping story, told in crystalline prose and with all the nuance and drama of a novel, but illuminated with heartbreaking insight into the very real lives of the dead, and hard-won hope for the lives of all those who carry on after.
Strangers With the Same Dream
Praise for Strangers With the Same Dream
“Strangers with the Same Dream deserves to be read widely, not simply for its bold, compelling engagement with a tumultuous moment in history, but for Pick’s superb gifts as a writer. Her ear is finely tuned, her prose faultlessly rendered with compassion and lyrical grace. It’s a novel deeply worthy of the accolades sure to come.”
– The Toronto Star
Stunning. On one level, a fascinating novel about early kibbutz life. More deeply, this is thought-provoking fiction that asks important questions about idealism, privacy, equality, power, corruption and war.
--Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows
Strangers with the Same Dream explores the dark side of utopian longing with terrific sensitivity, intelligence, and attention to beauty. Alison Pick is one of the wisest and most compassionate of writers.
--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
A riveting, timely novel that takes an essential moment in history and allows it to blaze into being in all its strange and glorious complexity. Alison Pick has a way of reinventing the novel again and again.
--Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
A brilliant, astonishing and politically timely page-turner set in 1921 Palestine, from the author of the bestselling novel Far to Go, nominated for the Man Booker Prize.
This beautifully written, shocking and timely novel whisks us back to 1921, when a band of young Jewish pioneers set out to realize a dream: the founding of a settlement on a patch of land that would, twenty-five years later, become Israel. One by one, we enter the minds of three compelling characters--Ida, an idealistic young woman escaping violence brewing in Europe; David, the charismatic and volatile group leader; and Hannah, a wife and mother struggling with her roles--to witness how the utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements. This is also the story of the land itself, revealing with compassion and irony how the pioneers chose to ignore the fact that their valley was already home to people whose lives they did not understand.
Writing with restrained power, award-winning novelist Alison Pick creates unforgettable characters who, isolated within their utopian dream, are haunted by ghosts, compromised by secrets, and finally, despite flashes of love and hope, worn down by hardship, human frailty, and the pull of violent confrontation. Her astonishing conclusion forces us to confront the question of what is truly knowable in the human heart.
The Sweet Edge
Globe and Mail Best Book of 2005 ~ Optioned for film by Four Seasons Productions
Praise for The Sweet Edge
“This is one well-rendered book. In fact, it’s almost perfect.”
--Toronto Star
“The Sweet Edge is gorgeous. It’s also strange and funny and terribly sexy.”
--Globe and Mail
“A seamless marriage of poetic language and engaging dialogue.”
--National Post
“Writing with a delightful sense of urgency that is indeed sweet.”
--Vancouver Sun
“Poetic and insightful.”
--Atlantic Books Today
“Written beautifully.”
--Calgary Herald
“A moving and powerful story.”
--Quill & Quire
“A wholly enjoyable read that rings (sometimes uncomfortably) true.”
--NOW magazine
“Poised, polished, and often deliciously described... an impressive debut.”
--London Free Press
“A book that would probably appeal to almost anybody...”
--DOSE
“Beautifully written... a literary find.”
--Owen Sound Sun-Times
Poetry
The Dream World
“Pick’s wonderfully personal, lyrical language takes the reader to the spiritual heart of things. Meditative and often elegiac, this is language that sings and is always in the right key.”
— Jury citation, E.J. Pratt Poetry Award
“Pick’s voice remains clearly her own, consistently so, and remarkable throughout for its calmness and stillness…this is a voice to be reckoned with.”
— The Fiddlehead
Question & Answer
“Alison Pick’s poetry comes from a fusion of heart and mind, generous in both its intelligence and emotional range…We need this poetry, not just for the power of its cadences, its verbal fluency and vigour, but also for its depth, a spirituality tethered with grace to the world.”
— Don Domanski
“These lovely poems dare to speak about the human soul as if it’s as real as love or grief.”
— Michael Crummey