Overview

**Twentieth anniversary edition of Farrant's beloved memoir of coming of age with an absent mother in a vanished time** The setting is Vancouver Island, the year 1960. It is the era of the Three Stooges and the Red Menace, the apex of plastic, Arborite, and everything turquoise: high heels, pedal pushers, refrigerators, even cars. Throughout her childhood, Marion Farrant heard wild family stories of the sophisticated life her mother, Nancy, led far away in Australia. Nancy's world of riches and men seemed light years away from Cordova Bay on Vancouver Island, where Marion lived a working-class life with her aunt and uncle. But things changed the year she entered her teens. That year, Nancy threw everyone into a flurry with the surprise announcement that she was coming for a visit. This new edition of Farrant's beloved memoir of her fourteenth summer, capturing a lost time and place with love and hilarity, includes five companion stories, an introduction by Lynne Van Luven, and a preface by the author. Witty, tender, and wry, My Turquoise Years is a book for anyone who remembers being a teenager.

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9781772016369

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M.A.C. Farrant has been writing and publishing since the 1980s: Nineteen works of fiction, non-fiction and memoir; two produced plays, countless book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and Toronto Globe & Mail; and over a dozen chapbooks. Along with Pauline Holdstock, she ran the Sidney Reading Series from 1994–2009. Her books have been finalists for many awards, among them the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Ethel Wilson fiction prize, two Jessie Richardson theatre awards, The Van City Book Prize, the National Magazine Awards, the ReLit Award, the Gemini Awards for the Bravo short film adaptation of her story, Rob’s Guns & Ammo, and the Victoria Book Prize (three times), the last of which she won in 2014 for her collection of miniature fiction, The World Afloat. The Strange Truth About Us was one of the Globe & Mail’s Best Fiction books of 2012. Her 2021 non-fiction book, One Good Thing, was a BC Bestseller. Jigsaw: A Puzzle in Ninety-Three Pieces, another non-fiction book, was released in 2023. In 2024, Talon Books will issue the expanded 20th Anniversary Edition of her memoir, My Turquoise Years. Her most recent chapbooks are Some of the Puzzles (2021) and The Literary Cow Festival (2024) both from above/ground press in Ottawa. Talonbooks is the publisher of her last ten books. Farrant is well-known for her acerbic wit and laugh-out-loud humour. BC Bookworld has called her “Canada’s most acerbic and intelligent humourist”. Bill Richardson has called her “a master of the Zen-like art of delivering weight in a way that is featherlight” further noting that she’s “the most accomplished and unapologetic miniaturist in Canadian letters.” Archived material is in the “Special Collections Branch” at the University of Victoria.

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