The Birth House Audiobook

Quotes

• An altogether remarkable work from an impressive new talent.

  — Ottawa Citizen

• An astonishing debut, a book that will break your heart and take your breath away.

  — Ottawa Citizen

• The Birth House is a poignant, compassionate, bittersweet and nostalgic look at early 20th-century Nova Scotia. . . . Reading McKay’s novel is like dipping into a saner, more intimate, past; a past that’s long gone. . . . McKay is not only a new author to note, but one to look forward to with anticipation.

  — National Post

• From the beginning of Ami McKay’s debut novel, The Birth House, we know we’re in for a bit of magic. . . . The Birth House is compelling and lively, beautifully conjuring a close-knit community and reminding us, as Dora notes, that the miracle happens not in birth but in the love that follows.

  — The Globe and Mail

• The Birth House is filled with charming detail. . . . McKay has a quiet and lyrical style that suits her subject. . . . [It is] a story of individual human tenderness and endurance. . . . McKay is clearly a talented writer with a subtle sense of story, one that readers will look forward to hearing from, again and again.

  — The Gazette (Montreal)

• She’s dug deep into Maritime history to tell a story that rips right along. . . . You can tell that McKay’s got the goods.

  — NOW (Toronto)

• The Birth House is bound to be one of the most read novels of 2006. . . . Authentic, gripping and totally compassionate . . . The Birth House will be there next fall when they hand out the literary nominations.

  — The Sun Times (Owen Sound)

• Fresh as a loaf of homemade bread just out of the oven, The Birth House, a tale of sex, birth, love and pain will more than satisfy the hungry reader.

  — Joan Clark, author of An Audience of Chairs

• "The moon over Nova Scotia must have extra magic in it to have fostered a writer of Ami McKay’s lyrical sway and grace. She retrieves our social history and lays it out before us in a collage of vivid, compelling detail. In McKay’s depiction of Dora Rare, an early twentieth century midwife, attention is paid to the day-to-day moments of love and tending that enable humans to endure. And we the readers get to witness the emergence of a powerful new voice in Canadian writing.

  — Marjorie Anderson, co-editor of Dropped Threads I and II

• Ami McKay is a marvellous storyteller who writes with a haunting and evocative voice. The novel offers a world of mystery and wisdom, a world where tradition collides with science, where life and death meet under the moon. With a startling sense of time and place The Birth House travels through a landscape that is at once deeply tender and exquisitely harsh. McKay is possessed with a brilliant narrative gift.

  — Christy Ann Conlin, author of Heave