First Fiction Fridays: The Incomparables by Alexandra Leggat
The Incomparables is the debut novel from the Trillium-nominated author of Animal. Alexandra Leggat magnetizes the novel with Lydia Templar, the protagonist who possesses a sensual, unique way of understanding life through fabrics and tactility. The Incomparables is a book enlivened with the friction of old selves and grief, the city and deception, ghosts and acceptance.
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What:The Incomparables (Anvil Press, 2014)Who:Alexandra Leggat is the author of the short story collections Animal (shortlisted for the Trillium Award), Meet Me in the Parking Lot, Pull Gently, Tear Here (nominated for the Danuta Gleed First Fiction Award) and a collection of poetry entitled This is me since yesterday.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have been published in journals across the US, Canada, and the UK. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies. Why you need to read this now:The Incomparables is the debut novel from the Trillium-nominated author of Animal. Alexandra Leggat magnetizes the novel with Lydia Templar, the protagonist who possesses a sensual, unique way of understanding life through fabrics and tactility. The Incomparables is a book enlivened with the friction of old selves and grief, the city and deception, ghosts and acceptance. Leggat shows us the potency of our sense of touch, and allows us to understand the twinned force of love and death, always drawing closer. ***Lydia Templar is obsessed with the fabric, texture, and weight of cloth. Through fabrics, curtains, costumes, she expresses herself in a way she feels incapable of doing in words. For the past ten years, she’s apprenticed in the wardrobe department of a small Shakespearean theatre company and has finally been given the opportunity to showcase her designs. When she discovers her husband is having an affair with his leading lady, she seeks revenge the only way she knows how, she weaves her panic, pain, paranoia into the costumes. It costs her the job. She swears she’ll never sew again, packs her things and returns to her mother and the sprawling country estate she left years ago.When a group of counsellors from the city book the family’s Bed & Breakfast for the summer to prepare for a special wedding ceremony, Lydia’s plans to never thread a needle again are challenged. Through the one thing she cannot live without, the counsellors lure Lydia into a role she did not see coming — her self.The Incomparables is a novel about four houses, four families, and a large-mouthed pure god woven together by a thick, floral brocade salvaged from a dead woman’s couch. It is a story of the roles we cling to and lose and how the things we live for change or maybe never were what we took them to be.
