JUNIE by Chelene Knight and FIREBRAND by Joshua Knelman included in The Globe and Mail’s Book Preview List for Fall!
JUNIE: 1930s, Hogan’s Alley—a thriving Black and immigrant community located in Vancouver’s East End. Junie is a creative, observant child who moves to the alley with her mother, Maddie: a jazz singer with a growing alcohol dependency. Junie quickly makes meaningful relationships with two mentors and a girl her own age, Estelle, whose resilient and entrepreneurial mother is grappling with white scrutiny and the fact that she never really wanted a child.
As Junie finds adulthood, exploring her artistic talents and burgeoning sexuality, her mother sinks further into the bottle while the thriving neighbourhood—once gushing with potential—begins to change. As her world opens, Junie intuits the opposite for the community she loves.
Told through the fascinating lens of a bright woman in an oft-disquieting world, this book is intimate and urgent—not just an unflinching look at the destruction of a vibrant community, but a celebration of the Black lives within.
Vancouver-born Chelene Knight is the author of Braided Skin and the memoir Dear Current Occupant, winner of the 2018 Vancouver Book Award. Her essays have appeared in multiple Canadian and American literary journals and newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, and The Walrus and her work has been widely anthologized. Her poem ‘Welwitschia’ won the 2020 Contemporary Verse 2’s Editor’s Choice award. She was shortlisted for PRISM’s 2021 Short Forms contest. Chelene is the founder of her own literary studio, Breathing Space Creative, through which she has launched The Forever Writers Club, whose members are writers focused on creative sustainability. Chelene works as a literary agent with the Transatlantic Agency. She lives in Harrison Hot Springs, British Columbia.
FIREBRAND: It’s the start of the new millennium and a young lawyer is recruited to work for an unnamed multinational company. It isn’t until his second interview that the product the company produces is revealed to him: cigarettes. Possibly the most controversial consumer product in human history: seductive, addictive, and deadly—yet completely legal. Over the next decade, he travels the world as he works as legal counsel to help successfully market cigarettes in dozens of countries.
Firebrand ventures into the heart of the tobacco industry and the icy paradoxes of capitalism, each chapter a counterintuitive lesson on how cigarette companies—the target of increasingly intense anti-smoking campaigns and government regulations, including the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report and 200-billion-dollar debt of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement—continue to pivot and thrive in the 21st century, inhaling profits from their one billion smokers worldwide.
As Mad Men did for the alcohol-fueled, oversexed, corrupt world of New York advertising, Firebrand does for the even more despised world of big tobacco, in an addictive, behind-the-scenes piece of storytelling. The lawyer’s work takes him from manufacturing factories to hocking “sticks” at UK corner store counters; from tacky resorts in Spain and pirate city-states to luxury hotels and Grand Prix events across European and Asian cities. A contemporary tale of our ambiguous times, told with character-based drive and dry humour, Firebrand is a grand tour of the compelling paradoxes of globalization and corporate culture, shrink-wrapped in an engrossing narrative of a morally dubious yet completely legal enterprise.
Joshua Knelman is an award-winning author, a founding member of The Walrus magazine, and the recipient of multiple National Magazine Awards. His writing has appeared in The Walrus, Toronto Life, National Post, and The Globe and Mail. His debut true crime bestseller, Hot Art, earned the Crime Writers of Canada Best Non-Fiction Book Award and the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. He lives in Toronto.
Chelene and Joshua are represented by Samantha Haywood.