Description

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Cate, 43, is a university professor in an unfulfilling marriage. When Nuna, the young Inuk woman she mentors, disappears, Cate and her new friend, Isabel, 28, set out on a journey to find her. On the road, their friendship is tested, Nuna remains elusive, and Cate must contend with her ever-demanding husband who wants her to come home. As lead after lead falls through and the search reaches a critical impasse, Cate makes an important decision to stop living for others and finally live life on her own terms.

Set in Montreal, Ottawa and Nunavik, Looking for Her explores the intersecting lives of three women in search of themselves.

Carolyn Marie Souaid is the Montreal-based author of nine poetry collections and the acclaimed novel, Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik, set in Nunavik (Northern Canada), where she lived and worked for three years in the 1980s. She has performed at literary events in Canada and abroad, her work garnering a top prize at the 2012 Berlin Zebra Poetry Film Festival. Her literary papers (1967-2022) are housed in the Rare Books and Special Collections of McGill University’s McLennan Library.

Reviews

“Souaid crafts a story that is both provoking and pacifying. (. . .) Looking for Her is a novel worth unpacking and talking about.” Phoebe Phoebe Yì Lǐng, Montreal Review of Books

“[This book] raises some important questions about the White perspective of what our Indigenous people “need.”(. . .) Ms. Souaid’s writing and storytelling are smooth and very realistic, as are the dialogues. Each character is well-developed.” James Fisher, The Seaboard Review

About Carolyn Marie Souaid’s previous work

For Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik

“Her language naturally pairs with the physicality of the story … Unsettling realism is enhanced by Souaid’s understanding of the complications of race and complicity.”  Starred Review, Foreword Reviews

“Carolyn Marie Souaid has a brave honest voice and a love for northern Canada and its people that is genuinely moving to read about.” Tomson Highway

“Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik is the lyrical and absorbing result of a sincere mission to come to grips with another culture. That it took decades to commit to the writing is a tale in itself.” Ian McGillis, The Montreal Gazette

For This Side of Light (2022) (Poetry)

“This carefully edited book lives up to the task of bringing together Souaid’s powerful poems into a selected volume…a significant contribution to Canadian literature.” Jury Citation, Shortlisted for the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher

“Souaid’s fearlessness is unapologetic, and offers a courageous worldview, one that doesn’t hide from the truth.” Montreal Review of Books

For The Eleventh Hour (2020)

“The Eleventh Hour is deliciously paced and gorgeous. It makes the reader want to slow down and speed up at the same time – to revel in the words and rhythms but also to give in to the narrative thrust of each poem’s twists and turns and surprises.” The Pacific Rim Review of Books

For This World We Invented (2015)

“Souaid has her fingers so delicately placed on the pulse of her audience that they hardly notice when she starts to pinch…Not many books of poetry dance like this. Sublime and superb. I would like to use every compliment I can think of. Brilliant.” Michael Dennis, Today’s Book of Poetry, 2015

For Satie’s Sad Piano (2004)

“This long poem is perhaps the first serious effort to encompass the nation since Dennis Lee’s problematically Ontario centric/Torontonian Civil Elegies appeared in 1968 and 1972.” George Elliott Clarke, The Halifax Herald