Announcing One Book, One Community!

August 20, 2020

Action Read is pleased to bring the ‘One Book, One Community’ (OBOC) program to the city of Guelph. OBOC is a Penguin Random House of Canada initiative run in partnership with local literacy organizations or libraries. OBOC supports reading, celebrates books and writing, promotes Canadian writers, and builds a sense of community through the shared experience of reading. OBOC encourages people in the Action Read community and the wider city of Guelph to read the same book, discuss it, attend an event, and meet the author.

For our inaugural OBOC year, we have selected Guelph-based author and Action Read supporter Madhur Anand’s This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, published by Penguin Random House in June 2020. On one hand, we see Anand’s parents leaving India and coming to Canada during the time of partition. On the other, we see Anand growing up in mining towns and crowded city apartments in Canada. Throughout she grapples with a complex legacy of parental trauma, anger and joy, born in part, out of the rupture of leaving one’s homeland and building a new one. Told through a shifting kaleidoscope of science, history and memory, this is a vivid and lyrical story that both astonishes and pierces. Madhur’s story may be of particular interest to many Canadians of her generation, and to those interested in the Indian diaspora, but it will also appeal to anyone who appreciates a richly crafted, searing personal narrative.

Madhur Anand is the author of A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes, and several other literary works published in national and international literary magazines. She is a full professor of ecology and sustainability at The University of Guelph, where she was appointed the inaugural director of the Guelph Institute for Environmental Research.