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Fall on Your Knees cover art

Fall on Your Knees

Written by: Ann-Marie MacDonald
Narrated by: Ann-Marie MacDonald
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Publisher's Summary

“What a wild ride - I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” Oprah Winfrey told her viewers as she announced Fall on Your Knees as her February 2002 Book Club selection. Set largely in a Cape Breton coal mining community called New Waterford, ranging through four generations, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s dark, insightful, and hilarious first novel focuses on the Piper sisters and their troubled relationship with their father, James. Winner of the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book, it was a national best seller in Canada for two years, and it has been translated into 17 languages.

At the start of the 20th century, James Piper sets fire to his dead mother’s piano and heads out across Cape Breton Island to find a new place to live, eventually eloping with 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud, the daughter of wealthy, traditional Lebanese parents. And so, from early on, Ann-Marie MacDonald establishes some major themes: racial tension, isolation, passion and forbidden love, which will gradually lead to incest, death in childbirth, and even murder. At the center of this epic story is the nature of family love, beginning with the Piper sister who depend on one another for survival. Their development as characters - beautiful Kathleen, the promising diva; saintly Mercedes; Frances, the mischievous bad girl, who tries to bear the family’s burden; and disabled Lily, everyone’s favourite - forms the heart of the novel. And then there is James, their flawed father.

Moving from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I, to Harlem in New York’s Jazz Age and the Depression, the tense and enthralling plot of Fall on Your Knees contains love, pain, death, joy, and triumph. The structure of the narrative is multi-faceted, richly layered, and shifts back and forth through time as it approaches the story from different angles, “giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed” (The New York Times Book Review). As the details of the labyrinthine plot are pulled together, the question of whether it is possible to escape one’s family history gradually raises itself.

The book’s epigraph, taken from Wuthering Heights, seems appropriate to a novel concerned with the different, often violent, forms that love can take. On the inexorable journey toward tragedy we encounter dark yet vivid images of neglect and violence, yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, and yet the novel radiates an unquenchable life-force, shimmering with emotional depth, sensual with virtuoso descriptions of the power of music. It is a saga haunted by ghosts and saints, religious fanaticism, and magic. MacDonald gives the most ordinary lives extraordinarily dramatic dimensions.

The Sunday Times wrote, “It is the unpredictability of this huge book that is its greatest joy.” With allusions ranging from Hollywood stars to religious tracts, Fall on Your Knees simmers with vibrancy and crackling, effervescent, breathtaking language.

©2002 Ann-Marie MacDonald (P)2021 Knopf Canada

What the critics say

"Magnetic…a dizzying leap into a mind so rich and complex you spend almost as much time marveling how she got there as enjoying the results.... Compelling and original…MacDonald succeeds brilliantly in building a world that, at least for the satisfying length of time it takes to finish Fall on Your Knees, gloriously supersedes all else." (Financial Post)

"Beautiful…this big, bold, epic shocker of a novel reads as if John Irving met Joyce Carol Oates. It is history told with a thumping, complex narrative…a host of colourful characters and a great big bow to psychology.... Fall on Your Knees is the work of a big talent. It's a wild ride." (Chicago Tribune)

"Some wonderful writing has come out of Canada in recent years from such authors as Robertson Davies and Margaret Atwood. Now they are joined by the multi-talented Ann-Marie MacDonald.... She is already a successful actress and playwright. It seems almost unfair that she should have written a brilliant first novel." (Sunday Telegraph)

What listeners say about Fall on Your Knees

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One of two favourite books of mine!

Oh where too begin…
I was given this book, the paper version, way back in 1994 or so, I read it practically in one sitting.
I’ve not read it again, until I just listened to its author Anne Marie MacDonald, read it.
Almost 30 years have passed since I first got to know the Piper clan, and because I am nearly 60, it means so much MORE than it did the first time.
I must add, it is NOT for the faint of heart, Fall on Your Knees.
The core of the story is literally about child sexual abuse, so if you are reading my review, please take heed.

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Canadian Gothic

Family Saga/Canadian Gothic. Stunning book, so very interestingly written. Beautiful prose. Some of the story is wonderful and loving, and some of it is truly horrible, of which you get hints all the way through.

Narration was amazing, (performative in parts)

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Loved it, wish it didn’t end.

I loved this from beginning to end. The author’s narration made me enjoy it even more, listening as it was intended to be told.

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Amazing storyteller

We’ve listened to all her books and lm so proud to say she is Canadian. She’s a natural and l want to listen to more!

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Superb storytelling, you won’t want to stop listening!

I have heard many rave reviews of this book over the years, but struggled to find time to get through the book, Listening to it was perfect to fit in with my chaotic days, and I couldn’t wait to start it up again to hear what was going to happen next to the Piper clan. No surprise that’s Ann-Marie MacDonald’s narration is really well done, This story is one that won’t be easily forgotten.

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So compelling

Ms. MacDonald got me right from the start with her perfect Lebanese accents, in the middle of Cape Breton. The story was beautifully rich. Going to see the plays this month.

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One of the best

Picked the book on a whim, didn’t regret a single second. Great captivating story and narration. Twists and turns every chapter. Can’t wait to read/listen to more from this author.

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Great Book

One of the best books I’ve listened to in a long time .. I loved each and ever character the story kept me interested right til the very end.. it was also neat that it takes place in Cape Breton Island where my grandfather was from he was born in Mabou

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Too dark

This was my first book by the author. The narration was excellent but the story was too dark for my taste. If any of the reviews I read mentioned that it contains incest, rape, suicide, etc. I wouldn't have spent my credit on it.

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One of the best

I have often told people the the paper version of Fall on Your Knees is among the best books I have read. Now I can add that it is also among the best books I have ever listened to. Ms Macdonald is amazing.

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