All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

Here Comes the Dreamer

Three survivors of the 1950s: Alastair, a painter in a New York City suburb who fears atomic holocaust and the passions of the Red Scare; Claire Bernard, his young neighbour and witness to tragedy; and daughter Grace, a brilliant Toronto artist who stumbles into fury and visions of the unknown.

Midsummer

All her life, Joy’s been haunted by a man she’s never met — her visionary grandfather, the artist Lorenzo. At work on digging a New York subway tunnel, his pickaxe struck the remains of an ancient Dutch trading ship — and a vision lit up the underground, convincing him that he was blessed. As it turned out, his children did well in life, and almost a century later, his granddaughter Joy, a gifted linguist, married the Canadian descendant of the lost ship’s captain.

A Gardener on the Moon

Faced with the illness of his wife Marie-Hélène, Pierre LeBlanc finds himself overwhelmed by the past – a Franco-American who fled Massachusetts after World War II to escape his memories as a prisoner of war in the Philippines and the English language in which he lived this experience. He also left behind Lorraine and the lost child they were both afraid to mention. Years later in Montreal – during the terrorist crisis of 1970 –  his daughter Danielle struggles to claim Pierre’s abandoned language and her American roots, while Marie-Hélène’s illness confronts him with his unspoken fear of suffering and death. Alone on his farm, he looks after the land until an encounter from the past helps him come to terms with the sorrows of his life.

An Ordinary Star

In her last days, Sofia Fiore remembers a time of radiance and darkness. She lived in the Twenties, when the first Zeppelin flew over Manhattan and when a solar eclipse dazzled the Bronx, N.Y. Drawn to the wondrous, she never stopped seeing extraordinary things. In the shadows of depression and war, she reveres her father, the good Dr. Gentile, a naive follower of Mussolini, her mother Livia, whose fading light heralds her death and her anarchist grandparents living on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

A Forest Burning

Spanning two countries and the turbulent era of the 1960’s, the Viet Nam war and social conflict, A Forest Burning is a suspense-filled novel about memory, truth and forgiveness.

Missing Persons

In her first collection of short fiction, Giangrande explores the lives of people who inhabit the broken terrain of the late twentieth century. A man saves memory from the blur of media events by finding a tool more potent than television…an Ontario farmer reaps a strange harvest in the garden of a Lebanese exile…a photographer uses her creative eye to unravel the mystery of a missing friend…an antiwar march pushes a woman into the life of her beloved twin destroyed by Vietnam…Faced with the disappearance of homeland, memory and innocence, these short stories powerfully explore interpretive material for life’s dance.