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Rush Home Road Audiobook
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Publisher Description
Lori Lansens became one of Canada’s most sought after writers more than a year before her internationally heralded first book, Rush Home Road, would see publication in April 2002. So immediately and passionately was her novel embraced that it was already front-page arts news back in April 2001. Knopf Canada was the first publisher to buy this extraordinary debut novel, but just before the 2001 London Book Fair, Little, Brown US bought the rest of the world rights for a major six-figure sum (for Rush Home Road and the author's yet-to-be-written second novel), and rights have now been sold in numerous countries.
The Globe and Mail reported the record-breaking news with full, front-page coverage, and Little, Brown International Rights Director Linda Biagi found herself talking of nothing else in London; she sold Rush Home Road to a further 9 territories with the manuscript still unedited. Biagi likened the book to some of the most important literary achievements of our time, saying, “It’s as if John Irving had written The Color Purple.” Louise Dennys, the Executive Publisher of Knopf Canada, describes it as “a novel of startling beauty and great heart that will immediately find a place within that small, special tribe of books beloved by readers the world over.”
The untold story of the descendants of the Underground Railroad
Heartbreaking and wise, Rush Home Road tells the life story of Adelaide Shadd, who finds redemption in old age, and Sharla, a five-year-old mixed race girl abandoned to Addy’s care by her white mother. Born in the first decade of the 20th century in Rusholme (inspired by the real town of Buxton), in southwestern Ontario, an all-black community settled by fugitive slaves, Addy Shadd is raped as a teenager and forced to flee the family home. She makes her way on foot to Detroit, where she becomes the housekeeper for an elderly man and his grown son, both of whom develop a crush on her. When misfortune strikes again, she sets off to make a new life for herself in Canada. Thrown off the train at Keating, not far from her birthplace, she meets and eventually marries the train porter, the wonderful Mose, with whom she has a daughter. But when tragedy strikes, Addy is left alone.
Now an old woman, she lives a quiet existence in a trailer park near Chatham. Her whole world changes when a young mother asks her to babysit her daughter, as it soon becomes clear that the mother is never coming back. Addy is glad of the company, but not sure if she’s up to the job of mothering this sweet, awkward five-year-old. Nor is she sure how much longer she’ll be around to do so. How she manages is part of the story of this brilliantly captivating novel.
Written with verve, grace and unflinching emotional acuity, Rush Home Road is an epic story that explodes our notions of identity, justice, and heroism, penetrating one of our darkest periods with profound insight and humanity. Addy Shadd is a protagonist like no other -- full of quiet, steely bravery and tenderness of heart. This spellbinding novel will leave no reader untouched.
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"To read Lansens's Rush Home Road is to read Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women coupled with Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, but as if both novels had been penned by Toni Morrison... In Rush Home Road ... an Ontario almost never imagined, a secret, rural black Ontario, a landscape of tobacco, corn and strawberries and a history of struggle and beauty, is given magnificent, complex reality.... Lansens is a brilliant talent, with a profound, big-hearted comprehension of human flaws and humane possibilities."
— George Elliot Clarke, The Globe and Mail“Small-town Ontario is evoked like never before in the epic…Rush Home Road….a compulsive page-turner that keeps on chugging while shedding light on a part of Canadian history that’s not chronicled nearly enough.
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Impressive…. A fascinating story that probably will be unfamiliar to most readers…. This one may leave you weeping into your beach blanket.
— Boston Globe -
A poignant novel about the power of love and forgiveness.
— Booklist -
I can see Oprah, with a little makeup, playing Addy Shadd in a 5-hankie movie.
— W.P. Kinsella, Books In Canada -
Rush Home Road is a neat novel…packaged and presented with all the ends tucked in, not a thread unravelling from the smooth pages…compelling reading.
— Tara Klager, New Brunswick Reader -
“Lansens writes her tale with assurance, skillfully drawing rounded characters about whom the reader quickly comes to care….It’s one of those books that ends too soon.
— Red Deer Advocate -
"Lansens is a willing storyteller.... As a writer, she desires a particular kind of reader, one who wants above all to be transported--who might sit at her knee, the hearth.
— Noah Richler, National Post -
[A] poignant debut….Addy’s life -- her marriage, her children, her journey to Detroit and back to Canada -- is the rich core of a novel also laden with history….This is artfully done.
— Publishers Weekly, March 18, 2002 -
Lansens proves her potential….Lansens presents us with a time and place as steeped in history as the American south; rich material indeed…..Rush Home Road has a sweetness and a charm about it.
— Toronto Star -
The characters remain sympathetic even when patience and kindsness fails them. The book contains reversals of fortune, vivid characters and a rich vein of Canadian history rarely mined in contemporary fiction. In Rush Home Road, Lori Lansens creates a teeming, forgotten world linked to our own by one woman’s life, laid down across the twentieth century like a fragile railroad track.
— Annabel Lyon, Vancouver Sun -
"Rush Home Road offers an interesting storyline rich with satisfying plot twists that skilfully confute the reader’s expectations. But the novel’s true power comes from Lansens’ authorial voice -- a combinaton of grit and sensuality that exposes the full humanity of characters laid bare against an inconstant sociological landscape. The language flows effortlessly and naturally, dialogue rendered true and authentic through Lansens’ deft handling of vernacular. The author’s deep compassion for her characters evokes writers like John Steinbeck…
— Chronicle-Herald (Halifax) -
"The magic of Lori Lansens’ writing lies in the way it knows its characters, and the way the characters know each other….Rush Home Road is a major triumph made up of many small, wonderful things. Dickens has written some stuff like this; so have Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, Haruki Murakami and Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry and Roberston Davies. But not on their first try.
— Hamilton Spectator -
“immensely readable and informative about a root beginning in our history that I have not seen plumbed in other Canadian novels -- the black experience at the end of the Underground Railroad, principally in southwestern Ontario.
— Noah Richler, National Post -
"Lansens’ talent is evident in her ability to move beyond her own experience to recreate the hardship, loves and losses of a black woman in the last century. Her novel is a moving testament to survival.
— Margaret Macpherson, Edmonton Journal -
Rush Home Road is brilliant in its microscopic portrayal of the scent and stench, tears and screams, laughter and joy of black Canadian life in a small southern Ontario town. It draws with pulsating prose the picture of life in the developing ‘Negro’ societies formed by the proliferation of Canadian stations along the Underground Railway.
— Austin Clarke, author of The Question and The Origin of Waves:“This novel? It is the gospel of our history. -
Rush Home Road, the story of a 70 year old woman's journey through the nearly unbearable sorrows of her past, in order to save an abandoned little girl, is a first novel of exquisite power, honesty and conviction. Its portrait of how much has changed, and how little, over nearly a century, in the realms of race, love, hate and loss, is quite nearly without flaws.
— Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and A Theory of Relativity -
While wonderful novels about the black immigrant experience abound in Canada, few novelists, black or white, have written about the country's long-settled black communities. First-time novelist Lori Lansens ... does so passionately with Rush Home Road ... a compulsively readable book that leaves us feeling we know more about a time and place -- and about humankind -- than when we opened the cover.
— Quill & Quire advance review
Awards
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Nominated for Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, 2003
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Nominated for Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, 2003
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Nominated for Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, 2003
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Nominated for Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, 2003
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About Lori Lansens
Lori Lansens has written several films and is the author of the bestselling novel The Girls, among other books. She lives in California with her family.