Burning the Night

By (author): Glen Huser

Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!

From small-town Alberta, Curtis comes to Edmonton to obtain a teaching degree. There he forms a close friendship with his elderly, blind Aunt Harriet, considered a family pariah due to her eccentric enthusiasm for a lost world of artists and musicians.

When Curtis begins reading aloud to Harriet the diary her intended husband Phillip kept before his death during World War One, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life: his desire to become a skillful artist and to find fulfilling love.

Timeless and essential, award-winning author Glen Huser’s Burning the Night spans across generations and distance, traversing from Vancouver to Halifax, as it bears down on the history of Canadian painting and Curtis’s awakening as a gay man.

AUTHOR

Glen Huser

From his earliest years, Glen Huser has loved to write and read and draw and paint. That’s when he wasn’t losing himself in the dark cocoon of a movie theatre or picking out old-time radio standards and Broadway musical hits on the piano. As a teacher and school librarian for a lengthy career in Edmonton, he worked his passions for art and literature into school projects such as Magpie, an in-house quarterly featuring writing and art from students. In his off hours, he wrote movie reviews for a local weekly, children’s book reviews for The Edmonton Journal, and got his small ink landscapes into galleries. As he worked on a degree in Education and then a Masters in English at the U of A, he had the good fortune to work under the tutelage of Rudy Wiebe, Margaret Atwood and W. O. Mitchell. For several years he was a sessional lecturer in children’s literature, information studies and creative writing at the U of A in Edmonton and UBC in Vancouver. His first novel Grace Lake was shortlisted for the 1992 W.H. Smith-Books in Canada First Novel Award. He has written several books for young adult readers including the Governor General’s Award-winner Stitches and the GG finalist Skinnybones and the Wrinkle Queen. Short stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines, most recently Plenitude and Waterloo University’s The New Quarterly. Glen’s current home is Vancouver where he continues to write as well as pursue interests in art and film studies.


Reviews

Praise for Burning the Night:

“… in Burning the Night, [Huser] shows a gift for making experiences, even those not intrinsically glamorous, as visceral and magical as they would have been for Curtis.”
~ Kelvin Browne, Literary Review of Canada

Burning the Night begins with fire; the blackened sketches and journal pages of an artist fluttering down to become memories. Like these charred artefacts, Huser”s eloquent words become a puzzle on the pages, with pieces of the narrative fitting together to slowly reveal the lives of Aunt Harriet and of Curtis. This is the work of a master storyteller.”
~ Betty Jane Hegerat, author of The Boy

“This is a story of inner and outer sight, of blindness both acquired and enforced on us by society. Huser is a sensitive yet ruthless observer of human nature.”
~ Alison Watt, author of Dazzle Patterns

“Like a vivid shock of red in a sepia photo or the lurid love letter of an historical icon, Burning the Night unshackles the past from our dusty preconceptions, bringing it roaring into the full-colour present with the force of an atom bomb. Painting on a wide canvas of famous Canadian history, Huser perfectly conjures that feeling we get when we see images of our old relatives as young adults and think, ‘Wow, they were just like us.”
~ Bruce Cinnamon, author of The Melting Queen


Awards

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Excerpts & Samples ×

Includes Author-Curated Discussion Questions!

From small-town Alberta, Curtis comes to Edmonton to obtain a teaching degree. There he forms a close friendship with his elderly, blind Aunt Harriet, considered a family pariah due to her eccentric enthusiasm for a lost world of artists and musicians.

When Curtis begins reading aloud to Harriet the diary her intended husband Phillip kept before his death during World War One, an obsessed Curtis examines parallels to his own life: his desire to become a skillful artist and to find fulfilling love.

Timeless and essential, award-winning author Glen Huser’s Burning the Night spans across generations and distance, traversing from Vancouver to Halifax, as it bears down on the history of Canadian painting and Curtis’s awakening as a gay man.

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

272 Pages
8.5in * 5.5in * 1in
1lb

Published:

May 15, 2021

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

NeWest Press

ISBN:

9781774390115

Book Subjects:

FICTION / LGBTQ+ / Gay

Featured In:

Pride Reads

Language:

eng

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