Deafening

Frances Itani

Dec 2007 · Open Road + Grove/Atlantic

About this ebook

The internationally bestselling, “gorgeously moving, old-fashioned novel” about a woman’s life, loves, and self-discovery on the eve the Great War (O, The Oprah Magazine).
 
Grania O’Neill, the daughter of hardworking Irish hoteliers in small-town Ontario, is five years old when she emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf—suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. While her guilt-plagued mother cannot accept it, Grania finds allies in her grandmother and her older sister, Tress. It isn’t until she’s enrolled in the Ontario School for the Deaf in Belleville, that Grania truly begins to thrive. In time, she falls for Jim Lloyd, a hearing man with whom Grania creates a new emotional vocabulary that encompasses both sound and silence.

But just two weeks after their wedding, Jim leaves to serve as a stretcher bearer on the blood-soaked battlefields of Flanders. During this long war of attrition, Jim and Grania’s letters back and forth—both real and imagined—attempt to sustain their young love in a world as brutal as it is hopeful.

Winner of the Commonwealth Book Prize, Frances Itani’s debut novel is a “brilliantly lucid and masterfully sustained” ode to language—how it can console, imprison, and liberate—with “the integrity of an achieved artistic vision, the kind of power that is generally associated with the gracious, crystalline prose of Grace Paley, the flagrantly good, good lines of Robert Lowell and W. H. Auden’s poetry” (Kaye Gibbons, author of A Virtuous Woman).

Ratings and reviews

i have a really read this book and cried at end and i love it ,and i felt it in my heart .

About the author

Deafening marks Frances Itani’s American debut. Published previously only in Canada, Frances Itani is the author of four acclaimed short story collections, published poetry, a children’s book and has written stories, drama and features for CBC Radio. Passionate about learning and education, she has taught creative writing at universities, schools, libraries and workshops across Canada and in Europe and holds a BA in Psychology, an MA in English Literature, and did a graduate year of nursing. She has been learning American Sign Language (ASL), and practices Tai Chi and Qigong. She has been involved in humanitarian work all of her adult life, most recently as a volunteer and on the Board of Directors of the Ottawa Deaf Centre.