Garbo Laughs

Elizabeth Hay

McClelland & Stewart, Aug 27, 2010 - Fiction - 384 pages

A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year
A Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year


Elizabeth Hay’s runaway national bestseller is a funny, sad-eyed, deliciously entertaining novel about a woman caught in a tug of war between real life and the films of the past. Inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child, Harriet Browning forms a Friday-night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Into this idiosyncratic world, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood: Harriet’s Aunt Leah, the jaded widow of a screenwriter blacklisted in the 1950s, and her sardonic, often overbearing stepson, Jack. They bring harsh reality and illuminate the pull of family and friendship, the sting of infidelity and revenge, the shock of illness and sudden loss. Poignant, brilliant, and delightfully droll, Garbo Laughs reveals how the dramas of everyday life are sometimes the most astonishing of all.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - RandyMetcalfe - LibraryThing

Elizabeth Hay introduces her novel with an epigraph from legendary film critic, Pauline Kael: “We will never know the extent of the damage that movies are doing to us.” That brilliantly sets the ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - chicapeligrosa - LibraryThing

I did enjoy the story very much but found the flipping around from one POV to the next a bit confusing at first (especially without any significant separation in the text). Sometimes it wasn't clear ...

Contents

• Section 1: 39
• Section 2: 43
• Section 3: 50
• Section 4: 63
• Section 5: 67
• Section 6: 77
• Section 7: 83
• Section 8: 93
• Section 9: 95
• Section 10: 99
• Section 11: 121
• Section 12: 136
• Section 13: 139
• Section 14: 141
• Section 15: 155
• Section 16: 159
• Section 17: 163
• Section 18: 179
• Section 19: 193
• Section 20: 203
• Section 21: 221
• Section 22: 223
• Section 23: 235
• Section 24: 247
• Section 25: 265
• Section 26: 269
• Section 27: 271
• Section 28: 291
• Section 29: 300
• Section 30: 307
• Section 31: 313
• Section 32: 319
• Section 33: 323
• Section 34: 336
• Section 35: 367

About the author

Elizabeth Hay is the author of two highly acclaimed, bestselling novels. Her first novel, A Student of Weather (2000), won the CAA MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction and the TORGI Award, and was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Award, and the Pearson Canada Reader's Choice Award at The Word on the Street. Her most recent novel, Garbo Laughs (2003), won the Ottawa Book Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. She is also the author of Crossing the Snow Line (stories, 1989); The Only Snow in Havana (non-fiction, 1992); Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (non-fiction, 1993), and Small Change (stories, 1997), which was a finalist for the Governor General's Award, the Trillium Award, and the Rogers Communications Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her stories have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, The Journey Prize Anthology, and The Oxford Book of Stories by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan. She has won a National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction and a Western Magazine Award for Fiction. In 2002, she received the prestigious Marian Engel Award.

Elizabeth Hay lives in Ottawa.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Garbo Laughs
• Author: Elizabeth Hay
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2010
• ISBN: 1551994321, 9781551994321
• Length: 384 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Family Life / General; Fiction / Humorous / General; Fiction / Literary