Bozuk

Madeleine Turka lost her father at an early age, and was left in the care of her grieving alcoholic mother, never to leave the childhood home. Now a middle-aged sex/ massage therapist for seniors, Mad, who has a history of invisible friends, finds a new one when she reveals her loneliness on PostSecrets, a website where secrets are kept. Guzel, her cyber angel companion, picks up the message and joins her in Istanbul, helping her to discover herself and to overcome having been an outsider from a dysfunctional family. This is a tale for our times, a coming of age story that begins in Canada and evolves in present-day Turkey, engaging matters of family breakdown in the context of religious orthodoxy and deadly cultural conservatism. Bozuk (?Broken” in Turkish) allows us to realize that one can survive even the most cataclysmic of events.

Linda Rogers of Victoria, B.C., is a broadcaster, teacher, journalist, poet, novelist and songwriter. For fiction and poetry she has received the BC Centennial Prize, Monday Fiction Award, Stephen Leacock Poetry Prize, the Reuben Rose Poetry Prize (Israel), the Dorothy Livesay Award, the Hawthorne Poetry Prize, the Saltwater Festival Prize, the People’s Poetry Prize, and was co-winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition. Her journalistic work ranges from reviews, interviews and critical essays about literary, musical, dance and visual artists. She has edited several anthologies, and her work has been translated worldwide. She has served as President of the League of Canadian Poets and the BC Federation of Writers and was Canada’s People's Poet in 2000.