Boone docs
January 23rd, 2015
In 2014, Alix Hawley won the 2014 Canada Writes Bloodlines competition, judged by Lawrence Hill, and was runner-up for the CBC Literary Award for short stories in 2012 and 2014.
These distinctions have dovetailed with the release of her first novel, All True Not A Lie In It (Knopf $29.95), a funny and poignant historical novel set during the American Revolutionary War, told in the voice of Daniel Boone, as a “white Indian.” After being raised in a Quaker colony in Pennsylvania, Boone is twice captured by Indians in Kentucky, gaining an intimate appreciation of the Shawnee. It’s also a love story about Boone and his wife, Rebecca. Ultimately Boone establishes Boonesborough in 1775, one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachians. That’s where the novel ends, on the eve of a siege of that town in 1778, leaving room for a sequel. Her protagonist Boone lived until 1820.
As a fourth-generation resident of Kelowna, teaching at Okanagan College, Alix Hawley first explored attractions and distractions in her “dark and sharp” fiction collection, The Old Familiar (Thistledown 2008). In “Romance,” a young man employed for the summer by a wealthy family, discovers he and his first-time lover have different sexual motivations. In “They Call Her Lovely Rita,” a man feels he has absentmindedly misplaced his wife somewhere, and goes searching for her. In “Chemical Wedding,” a gorgeous woman manoeuvres the murky waters of a dinner party with a former friend’s family.
Alix Hawley studied English Literature and Creative Writing at Oxford University (where she wrote her doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf), the University of East Anglia, and the University of British Columbia. She is especially interested in nineteenth-century writing and children’s literature.
978-0-345-80855-4
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