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Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler |
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YOU'VE CHANGED
A hilarious traffic jam of emotion about a marriage, race, and sexuality.
Beckett, a 43-year-old white contractor from Maine now living in Vancouver, has aspirations of landing a big contract and proving his worth. He's married to Princess, a 44-year-old fitness instructor originally from Rwanda who strives to become more and more beautiful. In You've Changed, they attempt to save each other from parallel midlife crises.
When Beckett is fired from his job, he loses confidence and purpose. An inventory of his life reveals a man who has no friends and is estranged from his family; he could be the poster boy for the epidemic of male, middle-aged loneliness in North America.
Princess's crisis has a less linear trajectory. The day before Beckett loses his job, Princess's Black Rwandan childhood friend visits them with her African-American husband and dredges up Princess's difficult early years as a minority in Kigali. Princess's pursuit of beauty seems linked to a life-long sense of displacement. And the marriage of their guests invites Beckett and Princess to inspect their own. Are they even the same people anymore?
You've Changed asks which parts of identity are liquid and which solid. How much can we change internally and externally and still be the same person? How do changes to our present identities necessitate new interpretations of our past?
Ian Williams is the author of the novel Reproduction, which was the winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in the U.S., U.K., and Italy; Personals, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. In 2020 he published his latest poetry collection, Word Problems. In fall 2021 he released Disorientation: Being Black in the World, which was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the BC Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He has been named the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer.
When Beckett is fired from his job, he loses confidence and purpose. An inventory of his life reveals a man who has no friends and is estranged from his family; he could be the poster boy for the epidemic of male, middle-aged loneliness in North America.
Princess's crisis has a less linear trajectory. The day before Beckett loses his job, Princess's Black Rwandan childhood friend visits them with her African-American husband and dredges up Princess's difficult early years as a minority in Kigali. Princess's pursuit of beauty seems linked to a life-long sense of displacement. And the marriage of their guests invites Beckett and Princess to inspect their own. Are they even the same people anymore?
You've Changed asks which parts of identity are liquid and which solid. How much can we change internally and externally and still be the same person? How do changes to our present identities necessitate new interpretations of our past?
Ian Williams is the author of the novel Reproduction, which was the winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in the U.S., U.K., and Italy; Personals, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone's Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. In 2020 he published his latest poetry collection, Word Problems. In fall 2021 he released Disorientation: Being Black in the World, which was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the BC Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He has been named the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer.
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Book Published 2025-08-26 by Random House CA |