Photo Credit: David Parker
Website:
http://www.stephensgerardmalone.com/
Email:
c/o Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia
Born in Ontario, educated in Montréal, Stephens Gerard Malone currently lives and writes on Canada's east coast, where he's written for a variety of media, including television and periodicals. In 1994, he published his first novel, Endless Bay (Mercury Press) under the pseudonym Laura Fairburn. His second novel, Miss Elva (Random House Canada), followed in 2005 and was short-listd for the Dartmouth Book Award. Malone's next novel, I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin (Random House Canada) and made its debut in May 2008.
- I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin. Random House, 2008. ISBN 978-0679313410.
- Click here for more information.
- Miss Elva. Vintage Canada, 2005. ISBN-13: 978-0-679-31340-3.
- 2005 Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction nominee
- "Miss Elva distills the panoramic small-town tragedy down to its narrative essence, and the result is a strange and strangely elegant little book whose tense momentum rarely wanes." - Quill & Quire
- "A relentlessly action-packed, often menacing story of love and loss [...] To label this novel 'gothic' would be to undermine its almost feral energy [...] The characters, however, are well drawn and intense, and even the minor ones are memorable. There is some lovely writing, as well. - National Post
- "Miss Elva is a deeply poignant story, fashioned by a writer whose sensitivity to his characters holds us to its bittersweet ending." - Donna Morrissey, author of Kit's Law and Sylvanus Now
- "A page-turning chronicle of lust, drunkenness, violence and deceit set on Nova Scotia's craggy coast 80 years ago. Stephens Gerard Malone is the chronicler, and this first-time author and Maritimer-by-choice doesn't miss a beat. Miss Elva is plot plus. It's an action-driven narrative thickened with wonderful tension as back story and present action meet in a harrowing climax of murder, fire and flood [...] Malone masterfully captures the grinding poverty of his characters and their place in history [...] A thing of beauty [...] In Elva, Malone has created a knowing character, and yet a lack of sentimentality keeps her totally believable [...] An entirely readable novel that manages to transcend its insalubrious setting." - Edmonton Journal
- Endless Bay. A Novel by Stephens Gerard Malone writing as Laura Fairburn. The Mercury Press, 1994. ISBN 1-55128-014-0.
- "In the tradition of Jane Urquhart, it's a story of literary ghosts and ecstatic passions set against a thoroughly late-20th-century backdrop of a disintegrating marriage" - Books in Canada, November 1994
A Second World War novel of international scope and of moral power only made greater by the passage of time.
In 1932, a young Canadian is sent to Berlin to watch over the sizable property of his aging grandmother, who has just suffered a mild stroke. Entranced by a city that is surging in spirit, buoyed after years of depression by the rising tide of National Socialism, Michael Renner does not return. Instead, through the years leading up to the Second World War, he offers readers an entry point into the phenomenon that was the German people's complicity with the rise of the Third Reich.
As Michael makes friends, marries and becomes a father, we witness through him the banality of the anti-semitism and violent nationalism that leads to the Holocaust. But the dogma binding Michael to his new life grows poisonous and begins to unravel. Berlin's legendary sexual underworld, where masochistic cabarets mimic the spiralling violence on the streets above, proves to be dangerously irresistible - as does the prostitute Michael turns to for solace.
I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin is a powerful, moving story about the way ordinary people slip naively into horror, and how in times of moral chaos, disgrace might be the only place a man of conscience can live with himself.
A haunting canvas of jealousy, betrayal and atonement that can take its rightful place alongside Fall on Your Knees and Mercy Among the Children.
1970. A tiny fisherman's shack on the dark Nova Scotia coast, eccentrically covered with folk art images (á la Maud Lewis), which are all the work of a benign, disfigured mute whom the locals dismiss as a misshapen nobody. Miss Elva. Only one man knows that the whimsical, primitive art old Elva painfully creates is her voice, damning the madness of love and lamenting decades of lies.
He is also the only person still alive who remembers Elva as she was in the summer of 1927, a crippled little thing in the shadow of her beautiful half-sister, Jane. That peculiar summer of snow and rum-runners when the black sheep Gil returned to a troubled town for his father's funeral, dogged by sin and retribution - only to find that his handsome twin brother, Dom, has become Jane's lover. The unhappy reunion breeds rivalry and self-loathing, complicated by racial violence and religious intolerance. And Elva, missing nothing and hoping to free those she loves from pain, unwittingly unleashes the fire that destroys them all.
A master of narrative tension, Stephens Gerard Malone saves one last twist for the end - the "miracle" of redemption - driving home his evocative tale of jealousy and its disturbing consequences.
Endless Bay opens innocently. Montreal scholar Rhea Northway's life, both personal and professional, is at a standstill. Her solution is to write the definitive biography of the great 19th century Canadian novelist, Charles D'Arnell, the mysterious author of Lenora, a sweeping, romantic and tragic story about making the greatest sacrifice - death and dishonour - for love.
However, without her knowledge, Rhea's interest in the novel and her work on the biography starts a harrowing descent into obsession, as she leaves her husband behind and travels first to Haworth, England, and then to Endless Bay, Nova Scotia, in search of information about D'Arnell. All of those touched deeply by D'Arnell's novel and Rhea's obsession - D'Arnell's living relatives, Rhea, her husband, and fellow student Abelard Hearn - come under the influence of the shadow cast across time by D'Arnell, and are caught by Lenora's destructive power, as if by the power of the sea, pounding against the cliffs at D'Arnell's place of death, Endless Bay.
Endless Bay is a compelling, tragic story of the deadly price of blind ambition. Literature, history, and passion intermingle in this absorbing tale of passion and deception.
"Stopping the car, I saw for the first time traces of the village tucked in the wilderness. Beyond the buildings were the emerald velvet clutching arms of Endless Bay, unchanged from the day when Charles D'Arnell wandered its shore, driving his heroine mad with unrequited passion. Several fishing boats, nothing more than glimmering specks from where I stood, bobbed up and down contentedly on the water, while overhead, a great arc of cloud swept in from over the mountains and poured itself downwards into the wide bay, lingering as a low enveloping mist until it rolled off towards the horizon. Charles D'Arnell must have known that he could never leave this place. From that moment, one way or another, neither could I." - from Endless Bay
