Marianne Ackerman
Writer
Oyster: A Novel
by Marianne Ackerman
One-time bestselling novelist Amelia Cameron has writer’s block. After her octogenarian father falls off a roof during a windstorm, his funeral brings the four Cameron siblings together on the family farm, following years of separation. With the patriarch gone, familiar relationships begin to crumble.
While the siblings spar, Amelia’s niece, Ginny Gupta, begs her famous aunt for writing advice on her first novel. After a wine-soaked weekend and an innocent bit of typing, the resulting novel, The World Is Your Oyster, brings both women to the brink of scandal with the potential to shake the powerful literary world.
To read the first chapter of Oyster, click below…
Q&A With Marianne: Plays Versus Novels, Life Versus Fiction
Q: You’ve written four novels and more than a dozen plays. What are some of the differences?
MA: A novel is an intimate experience. Oyster opens with a woman in a bath, caught up in reverie during a heat wave….
Read the rest - click below!
What readers are saying…
I'm writing to tell you just how much I enjoyed Oyster! I finished it last night. It's beautifully written and felt. I loved Amelia Cameron and the portrait you paint of her and her family. Of Prince Edward County, Toronto and the publishing world! And you do it all with much insight, heart and humour. Bravo and thank you!
I loved it. The writing is so good, from sentences on up. The sense of family relationships is wonderfully set in place. Overall, a very enjoyable page-turner. Congratulations.
I finished reading Oyster last night. Wow, what a great book. Congratulations. You should be very proud. For me, the book was a slow page-turner: partly because I always have 10-12 books on the go at any one time (there be rabbit holes), but mainly because I wanted to let the wonderful story and your lovely prose infuse in my mind. It's a story that works well over time, I think. But I can also imagine another reader galloping through it because of its pace.
You hear lately about young people who can no longer sustain their reading attention for anything but short texts; but I think your book might be an answer to that because there are so many dramatic events throughout the book that can offer lay-bys for the reader to pause and reflect. The story will call you back.
When we were very young, we were given abundant time and space to to do nothing, to develop our imaginations in fact. A recent study I read about argued that regularly spending time reading, particularly fiction, can have a beneficial effect on our well being (mental health in new money). Your book, I think, would be an ideal place to start.
It resonates with my soul and perspective on understanding the not really understandable human condition!
An absorbing family saga that grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go. The characters sing off the page. I immediately got a sense of the Cameron family’s hierarchy of siblings and position in the community as well-to-do Canadian WASP country folk. Their latent repression, the Ontario omertà, the simmering Catholic tensions and sense of removal from the land they once farmed for survival was all familiar to me and well-wrought. The vineyard as a metaphor for the corrupting influence of affluence is a brilliant touch. The wine and food! Prince Edward County is a very particular and distinct corner of south-eastern Ontario, a place that deserves to be mythologised. Oyster does it great justice by building a world readers will want to inhabit and explore.
Oyster has a powerful narrative pull. When I had to put it down at page 170 to do something, I was anxious to get back to the manuscript.