Everything Was Good-Bye - Softcover

Gurjinder Basran studied creative writing at Simon Fraser University and The Banff Center for the Arts. Her work was shortlisted for the 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award and earned her a place in the Vancouver Sun s annual speculative arts and culture article, Ones To Watch. A 2006 graduate of Simon Fraser University s award-winning Writer s Studio, Gurjinder has read her work at the Vancouver International Writers Festival and has been both a panelist and facilitator on writing at the 2007 Writer s Studio alumni symposium. She lives in Delta, British Columbia with her husband and two sons. This is her first novel.

Gurjinder Basran s ambitious novel Everything Was Goodbye is the fascinating story of a strong-willed young Indo-Canadian woman raised in the Lower Mainland, and traces her life from adolescence to middle-age a life of rebellion against the expectations of a tradition-bound widowed mother and the demands of her community. Meena s story brings us intimately into her world, and allows us to identify with the difficulties of trying to live in the culture of a new world while dealing with expectations and demands originating in another. Although she is to a certain extent representative, Meena is also a unique rebel, imaginative and passionate, torn between a weakening attachment to her family and her desire to be part of the larger Canadian culture she has been raised within. There is heartbreak here, and violence, but there is romance and bravery as well, and some triumph. Above all, there is the reward of getting to know this bravely determined young woman. --Jack Hodgins