Fall on Your Knees

“First rate…. MacDonald paints a Cape Breton landscape steeped in human emotions…. She has found the language of the heart that runs below everyday discourse…. There is no resisting this story.”

—
The Globe and Mail

“A delicious story, one of those sweeping family sagas to take on summer vacation and savour…. MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise.”

—
Montreal Gazette

“With
Fall On Your Knees
, playwright MacDonald has taken a surprising leap into the front ranks of major Canadian novelists….
Fall On Your Knees
is a novel … of such power that it lingers in the mind and continues to astonish long after the book has been put down. Eloquent, richly textured and eminently readable.”

—
London Free Press

“This jaw-droppingly assured leap into fiction writing by the variously talented MacDonald surprises not so much by its craft but by the depth of its feeling. MacDonald’s glittering intellect mixes with a newfound yearning in this rich and haunted tale…. [Her] moody, but always precise, prose creates a historically accurate portrait of the racially rich town of New Waterford and of Harlem’s pre-Cotton Club days…. But it’s the emotion that drives this novel, naked — in more ways than one. A knockout.”

—
NOW

“How many women leap to mind when you think of really memorable characters in Canadian fiction? Margaret Laurence’s Hagar Shipley, certainly. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne. And they’re about it. With her first novel, Toronto playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald has added Frances Piper, one of the most fascinating and multifaceted characters, male or female, to hit the printed page in years…. MacDonald’s unapologetic, operatic sense of drama gives this book its wild storms and sunshine, so different from so many Canadian novels with their fine, constant drizzle of the everyday. It helps that the novel is also really funny.”

—
Ottawa Citizen

“Fall On Your Knees
proves that sisterhood is powerful — but not exactly as we thought it would be. It’s a bit like performing the Stations of the Cross to rock ‘n’ roll.”

—Rita Mae Brown, author of
Ruby Fruit Jungle
and
Riding Shotgun

“Some wonderful writing has come out of Canada in recent years from such authors as Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood. Now they are joined by the multi-talented Ann-Marie MacDonald … She is already a successful actress and playwright. It seems almost unfair that she should have written a brilliant first novel.”

—
Sunday Telegraph

“Ann-Marie MacDonald has produced a haunting, assured and astute first novel…
. Fall On Your Knees
is a huge, old-fashioned epic full of plot twists. The story leaps gracefully across generations, national borders and cultural standards regarding race, class and sexual orientation.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

“Wondrous…. Its once-upon-a-time opening promises a rich family saga. The novel more than delivers with a heartbreaking story…. The reader is drawn into the intricate, haunting world of the Piper sisters and comes away thinking, Here is a true miracle of fiction.”

—
The Houston Chronicle

“If
Fall On Your Knees
were merely a well-crafted, compelling story, it would be a tremendous achievement for a first time novelist. But MacDonald is also hard after her readers’ hearts. In conceiving the 20th century as a character instead of a backdrop, MacDonald implicates us all in her story.”

—
The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Captivating — it’s a rollicking, playful, sometimes dark journey through three generations of a Cape Breton family…. MacDonald skilfully crafts a saga that keeps her readers deeply interested, shocked, enraged and amused…. A strange and wonderful story.”

—
Winnipeg Free Press

“An extraordinary family saga of Gothic proportions…. She keeps you reading, not with gimmicks but with gripping, unforgettable characters so archetypally resonant, so realistically evoked, that they live themselves right off the page.”

—
Books in Canada

“Here is an explosive mix of family feuds and incest, musical dreams and melodrama, all shot through with a fierce guilt …
Fall On Your Knees
is a heady, haunting brew, carefully structured, witty and distinctive.”

—
The Observer

“The uniqueness of MacDonald’s voice, and of her approach, lies in her ability to distill … She can capture, deftly, the fleeting moment, the fragmented feelings that make up so much of what we term ‘understanding’. Thus, complex experiences become single, vivid images. It is a rare talent that can produce it for others to see.”

—
The London Times

“In this resonant first novel … Ms. MacDonald skilfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

Ann-Marie MacDonald is a Toronto-based writer and actor. Her play
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet)
won the Governor General’s Award for Drama, the Chalmers Award for Outstanding Play and the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama. She won a Gemini Award for her role in the film
Where the Spirit Lives
and was nominated for a Genie for her role in
I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Fall On Your Knees
is the winner of The Commonwealth Prize for Best First Fiction, The CAA Harlequin Literary Award for Fiction and the Dartmouth Award. It was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Trillium Award, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Britain’s Orange Prize for Best Novel by a woman writer. Ann-Marie MacDonald lives in Toronto.

Dedicated with love and gratitude to
Cheryl Daniels and Maureen White

Thanks and Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the following individuals and organizations, as well as to acknowledge certain books that were particularly helpful in the course of her research. David Abbass, Sister Simone Abbass CND, The Canada Council,
Cape Breton’s Magazine
, Cheryl Daniels, Diane Flacks, Lily Flacks, Rita Fridella, Nic Gotham, Malcolm Johannesen, Honora MacDonald Johannesen, James Weldon Johnson’s
Black Manhattan
, Paul Fussell’s
The Great War and Modern Memory
, Daphne Duval Harrison’s
Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920’s
, Arsinée Khanjian, Suzanne Khuri, Margaret MacClintock, Cuddles MacDonald, Dude MacDonald, John Hugh MacDonald, Katie MacDonald, Laurel MacDonald, Sister Margaret A. MacDonald CND, Mary Teresa Abbass MacDonald, Harold MacPhee and The Black Cultural Centre of Nova Scotia, John Mellor’s
The Company Store
, Bill Metcalfe and the Cape Breton Highlanders Association,
New Waterford Three Score & Ten
ed. Ted Boutilier, Beverly Murray, Michael Ondaatje, The Ontario Arts Council, Bridglal Pachai’s
Beneath the Clouds of the Promised Land
, Pearl, John Pennino and The Metropolitan Opera of New York Archives, Archival Staff of The Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, Father Principe of Saint Michael’s College U of T, Shari Saunders, Wayne Strongman, Lillian MacDonald Szpak, Kate Terry and The Beaton Institute of The College of Cape Breton, Mrs Helen Vingoe, Maureen White, Gina Wilkinson.