This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves. This item is unavailable.This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves

WINNER OF THE 2020 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION

"Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader...This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force." --Jane Urquhart

An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.

We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale--we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation.

Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.

MADHUR ANAND's debut book of prose, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart (2020), won the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Her debut collection of poems, A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (2015), was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and named one of ten all-time "trailblazing" poetry collections by the CBC. Her second collection of poems, Parasitic Oscillations (2022), was published to international acclaim and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. She is a professor of ecology and sustainability at the University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural Director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.