Fall on Your Knees - Brossura

"Magnetic... a dizzying leap into a mind so rich and complex you spend almost as much time marvelling how she got there as enjoying the results... Compelling and original... MacDonald succeeds brilliantly in building a world that, at least for the satisfying length of time it takes to finish Fall On Your Knees, gloriously supersedes all else." -- Financial Post

"Beautiful... this big, bold, epic shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oates. It is history told with a thumping, complex narrative... a host of colourful characters and a great big bow to psychology... Fall On Your Knees is the work of a big talent. It's a wild ride." -- Chicago Tribune

"[MacDonald is] a first-rate novelist.... [She] paints a Cape Breton landscape steeped in human emotion ... She has found the language of the heart that runs below everyday discourse.... There is no resisting this story." -- The Globe and Mail

"Ann-Marie MacDonald -- one of Canada's most talented actors and playwrights -- has provided us with yet another aspect of a talent that has no limits." -- Timothy Findley

"Brilliant... Profoundly and refreshingly different.... MacDonald has constructed a plot worthy of Victor Hugo... A standout." -- Vancouver Sun

"MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise." -- The Montreal Gazette

"... a narrative presence that can look at the unbearable, and sustain the emotion of it, and deliver it up edged in mordant wit." -- EDITOR'S CHOICE, Notable Books of 1996, The Globe and Mail

"... a multi-generational saga ... carried off with great assurance and style." -- Philip Marchand, CRITIC'S CHOICE, The Toronto Star

"... utterly compelling -- a brilliant take on the black themes of racism, physical and emotional battery, sexual abuse, suicide, and murder." -- The Vancouver Review

"Stunning...The book and the talent behind it are big. The story is riveting, the characters achingly human, and the writing will take your breath away...[MacDonald] has leapt into the first rank of fiction writers." -- Toronto Star

"A delicious story, one of those sweeping family sagas to take on summer vacation and savor.... MacDonald is a master of exciting story-telling, of suspense and surprise. She has a dramatic touch that can elicit gasps from readers." -- Montreal Gazette

"Not a single line is superfluous in this richly layered tale of the secrets within several generations of a Canadian family." -- Publisher's Weekly starred review February 24th, 1997

"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 London Observer

"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 & playwright. It seems almost unfair that she should have written a brilliant first novel." -- Sunday Telegraph

Ann-Marie MacDonald, playwright, actor and novelist, was born in 1958 and spent the first five years of her life in Baden-Baden, West Germany. Growing up on a Canadian Air Force base, she was constantly on the move and though she has lived in Toronto for more than twenty years, she still feels “geographically rootless.” Yet she has many relatives live in Cape Breton. Her father is from New Waterford, where he worked in the mines to put himself through university, and her Lebanese mother is from Sydney. Every time they went back to Cape Breton, MacDonald would feel “like I was going back to the one spot on Earth where there was an anchor.”

Moreover, as a child, her parents would tell stories that would captivate her. “For me Cape Breton was this mythic place with these mythic people who were my parents’ family and friends. It seemed like all things authentic had happened there... For me it existed in the realm of fiction already because it existed in my imagination as almost a magical place, and certainly a haunted place.” Because she never lived in one place for long, stories became very important. “Stories became my roots.”

In 1980, MacDonald graduated from the National Theatre School in Montreal. In 1988, after working on several collective creations, her first solo-penned play, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning, Juliet), premiered. Since then the play has had over one hundred productions worldwide, including last year's sold-out Canadian Stage production in Toronto which featured MacDonald in the lead role. As a successful actor, something she does “for fun,” her screen credits include I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, Where the Spirit Lives and Better Than Chocolate. She continues to write for the theatre -- among the more recent productions is a collaboration called Anything That Moves, which won the Dora Award for Outstanding New Musical -- and also writes screenplays for television.

“I tell stories in various ways,” says MacDonald, and that helped her to create the unforgettable identities of the characters in Fall on Your Knees. “I’ve played every single part in that book. I’ve said all their lines. And I’ve been through every one of their stories as I would if I were taking on a role. For me that’s the litmus test of whether the character is true.” But MacDonald was having problems telling the story of Fall on Your Knees when it began its life as a play. Not until a good friend and colleague asked her when she would start writing fiction did she realize that perhaps she was trying to tell the story in the wrong format; the story needed to be told as a novel. She spent five years working on it, writing in six-month stretches and then working to pull herself out of debt for the next six months. And in spite of it being a somewhat anti-social process, she plans to write more books. “Writing a novel was like a journey to another planet. I really loved that long, long journey -- the sense of huge frontiers and vistas opening up.” Her second novel will be set during the Cold War in the early 1960s, drawing on her experiences as an “air force kid.”

Meanwhile, she enjoys her role as host of CBC-TV's Life and Times. “I'm a documentary junkie, and people's stories fascinate me, both because of what they choose to reveal and what they reveal quite unconsciously. I like being surprised by a story that I thought I knew — I like finding out that I didn't really know it after all.”

In February 2002, MacDonald became the second Canadian author to have their book chosen by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club. “I still feel that the best thing that can happen to a book is that someone reads it, tells their friend. That, quite simply, is what Oprah Winfrey does. She reads it, likes it, and tells her friends and tells her viewers. It’s word of mouth, writ large.” Thankfully, the importance of delivering a fulfilling story to the reader isn’t lost on MacDonald, perhaps because she’s accustomed to having the audience in the same room. “It reminds me that there’s somebody who made time, who paid their money.... I don’t want to disappoint that person...the person who loves stories.”