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Indigenous Reads: Panel discussion on The Break

The #IndigenousReads book club has convened its very first panel discussion on Katherena Vermette's The Break.
From left: Eden Robinson, Gordon Tanner and Jeannine Covan. (CBC)

The #IndigenousReads book club has convened its very first panel discussion.

The Break by Katherena Vermette takes us into the interwoven lives of the people who live in Winnipeg's North End.
There is violence at the root of this story, but there is also humour, hope and healing. It has been short listed for the $25,000 Rogers Writer's Trust Fiction Prize and it has also been nominated for a Governor General's Award for fiction.

Our panel this week is Gordon Tanner, an actor who has lived in Winnipeg all his life but never in the North End, Jeannine Covan, a nurse living in Amherst, N.S., who spent several years working in Indigenous communities and award-winning author Eden Robinson, whose debut novel, Monkey Beach, was short listed for the Giller Prize.
Katherena Vermette, author of The Break. (Lisa Delorme Meiler)


"She hasn't written any villains. She's written people who are the product of their experience and those experiences are sometimes horrifying ... she talks about there being a monster inside somebody and not the person being a monster." - Gordon Tanner

"As a writer, I rely heavily on a single narrator to bring me through the book. And her use of so many narrators [is] so well [done]. It's just made me want to try it." - Eden Robinson

"It's such a web. Everybody is touching everybody's lives and you're being dragged through this with them." - Jeannine Covan

​Click the listen button above to hear the panelists discussion of The Break with Rosanna Deerchild.