Fall on Your Knees A Novel

Toronto, ON: Knopf Canada. Very Good+ in Very Good dust jacket. 1996. Stated First Edition. Hardcover. 0394281594 . Light wear to extremities, bottom fore corner of DJ chipped ; DJ in Mylar, unclipped. A bright solid, book. This is the full size first edition, not the smaller reprint. ; Large 8vo 9" - 10" tall; 566 pages; Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald's first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother's piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. .. some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the centre of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters; beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family's burden; and disabled Lily, everyone's favourite; forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father. Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York's Jazz Age and the Depression. .