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Author Michael Helm will read from his critically-acclaimed new novel, Cities of Refuge on Monday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. in the Ganong Hall Lecture Theatre. Michael Helm's debut novel, The Projectionist (1997), was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Award. His second novel, In the Place of Last Things (2004), was a finalist for the regional Commonwealth Prize for Best Book and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. A novelist and essayist, he teaches at York University. The reading is hosted by the Lorenzo Reading Series and the UNB Saint John Bookstore, and supported by The Canada Council for the Arts. Admission is free and all are welcome to attend. For more information contact The University Bookstore at (506) 648-5540, inprint at (506) 648-2315, or email sjbooks@unbsj.ca.

About the novel, Cities of Refuge

In Cities of Refuge, Michael Helm's keenly anticipated new novel, a single act of violence resonates through several lives, connecting close-by fears to distant political terrors. At the story's centre is the complex, intensely charged relationship between a 29-year-old woman and the father who abandoned her when she was young. It is a novel of profound moral tension and luminous prose, weaving a web of incrimination and inquiry, where mysteries live within mysteries, and stories within stories, and where the power to save or condemn rests in the forces of history, and in the realm of our deepest longings. "Cities of Refuge establishes Helm as one of Canada's most commanding writers." - Montreal Gazette