Books

Alcove writer honoured.  In the Eaton Auditorium in Toronto on October 18 the Governor General, Adrienne Clarkson, presented Gunda Lambton, from Alcove, with a Heritage Toronto Award for her book “Sun in Winter”, which offers descriptions of Toronto as it was in the 1940s.  The volume is published by McGill-Queen’s University Press.

October 16, 23, 30.  The signing of a new book by an Aylmer author:  A Book of Kells: Growing Up in an Ego Void.  Margaret Kell Virany , a former editor of the newspaper The Aylmer Bulletin, has written a book describing her origins.  Her father, a sailor in the Royal Navy in World War I, became a Methodist minister, and begain his married life with her English mother at Oxford House in northern Manitoba.  The arrival of their three children led them to move to other pastoral charges.   Mrs. Virany recounts their courtship -  using preserved letters – their life at Oxford House and elsewhere,  her early experiences and the perplexities which her parents’ religous attitudes caused her, and her eventual reconciliation with a mother from whom she had long felt estranged.  She tells of the influence of the late Northrop Frye, the distinguished literary scholar at the University of Toronto, on the shaping of her own view of life.
The original Book of Kells is a celebrated illuminated gospel manuscript, produced by Irish monks in the ninth century.  Mrs. Virany remarks, at the end of the book, “It would be a stretch for me to claim lineage from them, but my family did try to illuminate the gospels by the way they lived their lives.”  Her own family name is Kell, and she has chosen the title of her book accordingly.
Mrs. Virany will be at the Galeries d’Aylmer to sign copies of her book on the dates given above.  She can be found in front of Papeterie Thibo from 9 am to 5 pm.
Price: $22.50.  Available from the author – call (819) 684-9911  or e-mail margv@canoemail.com -  or from Papeterie Thibo, in the Galeries d’Aylmer – call (819)  684-8284 – or Tea ‘N Tole,  1055 chemin d’Aylmer – call (819)  778-6742.