How I Spent My Summer Holidays (Audiobook)
Pub Date: January 11, 2008
BTC Audiobooks / Fiction / Novels
Audio CD: 9780864924759 $29.95
Audio Cassette: 9780864922588 $22.95
When How I Spent My Summer Holidays was first published in 1981, one reviewer wrote: "If Who Has Seen the Wind told the story of a young boy's coming to terms with death, How I Spent My Summer Holidays tells of a young man's attempt to come to terms with his own sexuality and that of the world around him." The twelve-year-old young man is Hugh, and in small-town Saskatchewan it is the hot summer of 1924. When Hugh and his friends dig a secret cave out on the Prairie, they find it occupied by a patient who has escaped from the mental hospital. Defying the adult world, the boys become involved with a former war hero and current rum-runner in sheltering and feeding the runaway. But when passions explode into murder, Hugh leaves his boyhood behind him forever.
Author
W.O. Mitchell is one of the most recognized Canadian authors of the last century. He was born in Weyburn, Saskatchewan in 1914, and during a varied career he was everything from a Depression hobo to the fiction editor of Maclean's. His best-loved book, Who Has Seen the Wind (1947) is hailed as the quintessential Canadian coming-of-age novel. Other works include Jake and the Kid (1961), The Kite (1962), The Vanishing Point (1973), How I Spent My Summer Holidays (1981), Since Daisy Creek (1984), Ladybug, Ladybug (1988), According to Jake and the Kid (1989), Roses are Difficult Here (1990), For Ark's Sake (1992), An Evening with W.O. Mitchell (1997) and the play The Black Bonspiel of Wullie MacCrimmon (1993). He won the Leacock Medal for Humour for Jake and the Kid and again for According to Jake and the Kid. Mitchell was made an officer in the Order of Canada in 1973 and has been the subject of an NFB documentary entitled W.O. Mitchell: A Novelist in Hiding.
Reviews
"Moving, vivid and exciting — a beautiful, rich and utterly fascinating novel." — Windsor Star
"Astonishing. Mitchell turns the pastoral myth of prairie boyhood inside out." — Toronto Star
"Bawdy and raunchy — an uncannily accurate feel for the emotional viewpoint of a 12-year old boy." — Globe and Mail
