Transatlantic would like to congratulate our clients Sylvia McNicoll and Liz Harmer, whose novels BODY SWAP and THE AMATEURS are shortlisted for the 2019 Hamilton Literary Award for Fiction!

About BODY SWAP:

When fifteen-year-old Hallie gets knocked flying by a Hurricane SUV, her life ends without her ever having kissed a boy. At an otherworldly carnival, she meets and argues with the eighty-two-year-old driver, Susan. Both return to life, only with one catch — they’ve swapped bodies.

Now Hallie has wrinkled skin and achy joints while Susan deals with a forehead zit and a crush on a guy who’s a player. Hallie faces a life in a long-term care residence. Susan gets picked up for shoplifting.

As they struggle with technology, medications, and each other’s fashion foibles, they start to understand and maybe even like each other. But can they work together to prove that a defect in the Hurricane caused the deadly crash? Or will their time run out.

Sylvia McNicoll is the author of over thirty novels, including The Great Mistake Mysteries series. Crush.Candy.Corpse is lauded as the definitive Alzheimer’s story for teens and was shortlisted for the Red Maple and Arthur Ellis awards. Sylvia lives in Burlington, Ontario. 

About THE AMATEURS:

Allow us to introduce you to the newest product from PINA, the world’s largest tech company. “Port” is a curiously irresistible device that offers the impossible: space-time travel mysteriously powered by nostalgia and longing. Step inside a Port and find yourself transported to wherever and whenever your heart desires: a bygone youth, a dreamed-of future, the fabled past.    

In the near-future world of Liz Harmer’s extraordinary novel, Port becomes a phenomenon, but soon it is clear that many who pass through its portal won’t be coming back–either unwilling to return or, more ominously, unable to do so. After a few short years, the population plummets. The grid goes down. Among those who remain is Marie, a thirtysomething artist living in a small community of Port-resistors camping out in the abandoned mansions of a former steel town. As winter approaches the group considers heading south, but Marie clings to the hope that her long lost lover will one day return to the spot where he disappeared.    

Meanwhile, PINA’s corporate campus in California has become a cultish enclave of survivors. Brandon, the right-hand man to the mad genius who invented Port, decides to get out. He steals a car and drives north-east, where he hopes to find his missing mother. And there he meets Marie.    

THE AMATEURS is a story of rapture and romance, and an astoundingly powerful tale about what happens when technology meets desire.

Liz Harmer was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, but now lives with her philosopher husband and three children in Southern California. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. In 2014 she won gold in Personal Journalism at the National Magazine awards, after being awarded the Constance Rooke Award for Creative Nonfiction. In 2018 she was a finalist for the Journey Prize as well as appearing in Best Canadian Stories. Her debut novel, The Amateurs, released in 2018 with Knopf Canada, was a finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.

The Hamilton Literary Awards are an annual literary event with the goal of recognizing and celebrating the best of the city’s published authors. The Awards are presented to books of outstanding merit and quality in the categories of Fiction, Poetry and Non-fiction by authors residing in Hamilton and the surrounding areas. The Hamilton Literary Awards also include the Kerry Schooley Book Award to be given to the book that is most evocative of the City of Hamilton and/or surrounding area. The Kerry Schooley Book Award has been named in honour of the late Kerry Schooley who was a tireless advocate for literary arts in Hamilton.

Sylvia McNicoll is represented by Amy Tompkins and Liz Harmer is represented by Samantha Haywood.

http://bit.ly/2OgLq6j

Share: