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Garbo Laughs
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Hay
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
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Garbo Laughs
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Summary
Winner of the Ottawa Book Award
Finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award
A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year
A Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year
Elizabeth Hay’s runaway national bestseller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet’s Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.
Critic reviews
2003, Governor General's Literary Awards - Fiction, Short-listed
“Thumbs up for Garbo Laughs! Four-star novel celebrates love, film, and love of film.” (Ottawa Citizen)
“There aren’t enough adjectives to describe Garbo Laughs. The book is, quite simply, wonderful. It is inventive, intelligent, polished and enchanting. And you won’t be able to put it down. . . . Garbo Laughs is both beautifully imagined and sophisticated, a multi-faceted chronicle that holds the reader in a state of pure admiration. Hay is engaging and incisive. . . . Bittersweet, richly entertaining and deeply moving.” (London Free Press)