Atlantic Books Today AUTHORS IN CONVERSATION
Being Anna Quon by Annick MacAskill
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Photo by Julie Wilson
The novelist and poet discusses a new novel set in Slovakia and completing a trilogy she hadn’t known she’d started
hirty years ago, shortly after graduating from Dalhousie University, Halifax-based author Anna Quon spent eight months working as an English conversation teacher in Nitra, a small town in Slovakia two hours away from the capital city, Bratislava. Quon revisits this country, and specifically Bratislava, in her new novel, Where the Silver River Ends, a story about prejudice, discrimination, hope and connection. “It was a beautiful time of my life that ended with a great crash into depression,” Quon says of her months in Slovakia. “My couple brief visits to Bratislava were coloured by my mood, but I set my new novel there because I knew the feel of the city and have some images of it in my mind. I also wanted to honour my time in Slovakia by revisiting it in my imagination.” In this setting, Quon unites the protagonists of her first two novels, Migration Songs and Low. Thirty-five-year-old Joan, who we met as a cough drop-addicted unemployed 30-year old in
