Garbo Laughs
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3793-1
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Thoughtful, smart, sardonically funny, Ottawa’s Elizabeth Hay has created her own niche in Canadian fiction by fastening her intelligence on the real stuff—the bumps and glories in love, kinship, friendship.
—Toronto Star
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Winner of the Ottawa Book Award, 2004
Finalist for the Governor Genereal’s Award for Fiction, 2003
Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year
Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year
Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year
About the Book
Safely ensconced at the centre of a tight group of cinephiles is tall, dreamy Harriet Browning, a woman inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. With her eyes so intent on the screen, she fails to see her real-life leading man, whose own glances are about to seek out greener fields. Even the most fervent cinematic addiction can’t keep reality—with its sudden shocks and shifting allegiances—at bay forever. Garbo Laughs is a bittersweet comedy of secondhand desire, a virtuoso novel about the costs and rewards of falling in love with the movies.
Reviews
Review excerpt for Garbo Laughs: The Toronto Star
"Thoughtful, smart, sardonically funny, Ottawa’s Elizabeth Hay has created her own niche in Canadian fiction by fastening her intelligence on the real stuff—the bumps and glories in love, kinship, friendship." —The Toronto Star
Review excerpt for Garbo Laughs: The Globe and Mail
"A novel so subtle and so wonderfully layered that it resembles a black-and-white movie of a certain era, full of elegance, aura and wit." —The Globe and Mail
Review excerpt for Garbo Laughs: The Guardian
"For all its movie references, Canadian Elizabeth Hay's second novel [Garbo Laughs] is a very literary book. Its story—of family and friends, love and death—unravels slowly while its characters are lovingly fleshed out …. From start to finish, this book is perfect,...
Curled Up With a Good Book review of Garbo Laughs
Elizabeth Hay’s second novel, Garbo Laughs, is a movie fanatic’s dream. But I may be biased. I am a self-confessed movie junkie and insanely passionate about books. Hay serves up mountains of film and literary references that kept me riveted page after page. Her...
The New York Times review of Garbo Laughs
THERE are many addictions that can beset us in modern life: work, food, exercise, sex, shopping, the Internet, video games. And, as we're reminded in Elizabeth Hay's witty new novel, there are the movies. In Garbo Laughs—a reference to the way Ninotchka, the 1939...