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See also www.catherinebush.com
350 pages hardcover
Finished books available
Canada: McClelland & Stewart, Sep 2004
Film: Susan Tolusso
(Photo: Miriam Berkley)
Catherine Bush was born and raised in Toronto, the daughter of a physician and a museum volunteer, and lived there until the age of 18, when she moved to the US to study at Yale University. After completing a degree in Comparative Literature, including an undergraduate thesis on Amazons in 16th century literature, she moved to New York City. For five years in the mid-1980's, she wrote about dance and performance, freelanced for a running magazine, ghost-authored a romance novel about anthropomorphic bears, ran a successful reading series and lived on the Lower East Side. After spending a fellowship year at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she returned to Toronto. From 1997-99, she taught Creative Writing at Concordia University in Montreal, and in 2001 was a visiting writer at the University of Florida. She has also taught at the Humber School for Writers and in the University of Guelph's MFA programme. She has been Writer-in-Residence at McMaster University, the University of New Brunswick and the University of Alberta. She is currently on the faculty of UBC's low-residency Creative Writing MFA. Her nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications including the Globe and Mail and The New York Times Magazine.
Minus Time (1993), her first novel, was published by HarperCollins in Canada, Hyperion in the US and Serpent's Tail in the UK. It was shortlisted for the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the City of Toronto Book Award.
Her second novel, The Rules of Engagement (2000), was published by HarperCollins in Canada, FSG in the US and Het Spectrum in Holland, and in French by Editions Triptyche. Also shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award, it was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by the LA Times and the Globe and Mail. It has been optioned for film by producer Julia Keatley and is available as an audiobook from Goose Lane.
Forthcoming from Catherine Bush – The Thief: A Novel (on submission)
a novel by Catherine Bush
FOLLOWING THE CRITICAL SUCCESS OF THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, CATHERINE BUSH'S NEW NOVEL IS A GRIPPING AND DEEPLY MOVING GLIMPSE INTO THE WORLD OF MIGRAINEURS
- Canada.com profiles Catherine Bush, January 2007
- Shortlisted for the Trillium Award
- A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year
One a quiet June day, Toronto cartographer Claire Barber learns her sister Rachel has vanished from New York. As Claire disrupts her orderly life to follow news of her sister to Montreal, to Amsterdam, to Italy, and, ultimately, to Las Vegas and Mexico, she is haunted by fears that Rachel's worsening migraines may have finally pushed her beyond her limits. Struggling with her own headaches, Claire embarks on what becomes an emotional journey, one that brings to the fore long-held secrets from the past, the difficult memory of her parents' sudden death years earlier, and the unique, irreplaceable bond that exists between sisters. What Claire discovers will set her life on a new course. Engrossing, psychologically charged, Claire's Head explores how we live with pain—how much we can bear and what we're willing to do to free ourselves from it.
PRAISE FOR CLAIRE'S HEAD
“Catherine Bush’s third novel is an emotionally compelling and intellectually enthralling love story that is as much of our world as an MRI brain scan and as timeless as the Buddha. Brilliantly conceived and executed...Catherine Bush is as attuned to oddity and as sly, subtle, brainy and deadpan as Wertmuller or Barbara Gowdy or, come to that, Thomas Mann.” — THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Her book not only holds the reader's interest but goes far beyond the subject of headaches to an examination of pain itself, which she succeeds in exploring from an engaging literary perspective rather than a merely scientific one. Bush, who tends in her fiction toward an interest in "the place where our private and public lives meet", has once again demonstrated that combination of intellectual and emotional resonance that won her such accolades in 2000 for The Rules Of Engagement. Her prose is lucid and straightforward, well-suited to the delivery of her timeless message that yes, pain hurts, but while we feel it we are still alive.” — TORONTO STAR
“Catherine Bush’s fiction is clear, humane, gripping, and unfailingly intelligent. She is one of our finest writers.” — BARBARA GOWDY
“Science tries to measure it, but perhaps only literature can truly map the boundaries of pain, and its jealous dominion over us. In this suspenseful modern love story, Catherine Bush has also given us a wonderful fictional counterpart to Oliver Sacks’ classic study, Migraine.” — MARNI JACKSON