A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne.
Selected as the 2012 Title for One Book Toronto
A girl faints in the Toronto subway. Her friends are taken to the hospital with unexplained rashes; they complain about a funny smell in the subway. Swarms of police arrive, and then the hazmat team. Panic ripples through the city, and words like poisoning and terrorism become airborne. Soon, people are collapsing all over the city in subways and streetcars and malls, always prompted, they say, by some unidentifiable odour.
Alex was witness to this first episode. He’s a photographer: of injuries and deaths, for his job at the hospital, and of life, in his evening explorations of every nook and cranny of the city. Alex is a diabetic, now facing the very real possibility of losing his sight, and he’s determined to create a permanent vision of his city through his camera lens. As he rushes to take advantage of his dying sight, he encounters an old girlfriend – the one who shattered his heart in the eighties, while she was fighting for abortion rights and social justice and he was battling his body’s chemical demons. But now Susie-Paul is fighting her own crisis: her schizophrenic brother has been missing for months, and the streets of Toronto are more hostile than ever.
Maggie Helwig, author of the critically lauded Between Mountains, has fashioned a novel not of bold actions but of small gestures, showing how easy and gentle is the slide into paranoia, and how enormous and terrifying is the slide into love. This is a remarkable novel: romantically and politically charged, utterly convincing in its portrait of our individual and societal instability, and steadfast in its faith in redemption.
'Stellar ... Girls Fall Down is a tale of paranoia and mob mentality rendered in faultless and precise prose.' - Montreal Gazette
'All hail Helwig. Her powerful and poetic novel, Girls Fall Down, riffs on themes of terrorism and disease in the city, and the result is soulful, disturbing and exhilarating at the same time.' - NOW (naming her Best Toronto Author of 2008)
'[Helwig] has built a formidable thing in these pages, tracing the moments that connect 2.5 million people ... Girls Fall Down is a thoughtful articulation of life in contemporary Toronto.' - Globe and Mail
'Prose of astonishing rhythm and precision ... The real success of Girls Fall Down lies in its thematic scope ... This is serious stuff, but it never reads like a polemic; instead, Helwig's ability to manage tension lends her novel the feel of a controlled thriller.' - The Walrus
