Join us this evening, Saturday, February 7th at 7 p.m. for the Montreal launch of Denise Roig's Brilliant, a new collection of short stories set in Abu Dhabi, UAE. Roig will read from the book, which will also be available for sale and signing! Middle Eastern delectables will be served!
Brilliant is a collection of short stories set in Abu
Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, a polyglot city where cultures
collide and converge, where money — and sometimes justice — is no object, where
in less than two generations towers have replaced tents. In these dozen-plus
stories, a mixed grill of characters — an Egyptian pastry chef, a Filipina
nanny, a Canadian nurse, a cross-dressing Emirati — navigate this land of
sudden plenty, discovering the limits of freedom, money, tolerance and their
own good sense.
Several linked stories hinge on a hit-and-run bicycle
accident in which Victor, an Australian expat, is killed. If the Emirati
authorities know who’s responsible, they’re not saying. But more important than
whodunit is the impact the accident has on Victor’s racing mates, each
wrestling with careers, women and the complex, dangerous pleasures of expat
life in the richest city in the world.
In the title story, a couple, who’ve spent their long
marriage in the Gulf, are returning to Liverpool with nothing but memories of a
lavish life. For all the years abroad, theirs has been a tiny, contained world,
in many ways as insular as that of Asma in “Coffee,” an Emirati girl searching
for meaning and a little excitement in a life of unimagined wealth and entitlement.
Folded into these everyday lives are the myths and urban
legends that swirl around the place like sand. In a society where a tourist can
be jailed for taking photos of the wrong monument, yet where a sheikh can
traffic in drugs with impunity, an underground life springs up — rich, extreme
and sometimes darkly humorous.
Denise Roig is the author of two critically received
collections of short stories: A Quiet Night and a Perfect End (Nuage Editions),
and Any Day Now (Signature Editions), and the memoir Butter Cream: A
Year in a Montreal Pastry School (Signature Editions). Born in New York,
raised in Los Angeles, and a longtime resident of Montreal, Denise moved to Abu
Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, in 2008. She now lives in Hamilton,
Ontario. Denise’s first collection was translated in 2000 as Le Vrai Secret
du bonheur (Éditions de la Pleine Lune) and her fiction has been heard on
CBC’s Between the Covers. As a journalist, Denise’s work has appeared in The
Montreal Gazette and The National (Abu Dhabi). Denise is the
co-editor, with her husband Raymond Beauchemin, of two anthologies of Quebec
English literature: Future Tense and The Urban Wanderers Reader.