Between Men

by Katherine Govier

The story of a woman's dilemma in the present and her obsession with the past, focusing on Suzanne Vail, who at 32, is caught between two men - her nearly ex-husband Ace, a wealthy charmer who never grew up, and Simon, an older politician who seduces her with his talk of the "grand love affair".

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Katherine Govier is the author of eleven novels, three short story collections, and a collection of nursery rhymes. Her most recent novel is The Three Sisters Bar and Hotel (HarperAvenue). Here previous novel, The Ghost Brush (published in the US as The Printmaker's Daughter), is about the daughter of the famous Japanese printmaker, Hokusai, creator of The Great Wave. Her novel Creation, about John James Audubon in Labrador, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003.

Katherine's fiction and non-fiction has appeared in the United Kingdom, the United States, and throughout the Commonwealth, and in translation in Holland, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Japan, Romania, Latvia and Slovenia. She is the winner of Canada's Marian Engel Award for a woman writer (1997) and the Toronto Book Award (1992). Creation was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2003.

Katherine has been instrumental in establishing three innovative writing programs. In 1989, with teacher Trevor Owen, she helped found Writers in Electronic Residence. In 2011 she founded The Shoe Project, a writing workshop for immigrant and refugee women. She continues as the Chair of its Board of Directors. In 2019 Katherine was made a member of the Order of Canada.

She has edited two collections of travel essays, Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage and WIthout a Guide.

Reviews

[JuliannaM · Rating 1 out of 5]

CW: truly unhinged use of racist and sexist slurs, graphic violence towards Indigenous women

This is the literary equivalent of a heaping bowl of cottage cheese; bland, harder to take in the longer it goes on, and white as hell.

[Marieta · Rating 1 out of 5]

The reader is taken on a journey through the main characters head through 312 very slow pages while she's wondering what to do with her life. She associates herself the whole time with a native American woman from the same city, a victim of a femicide, she writes a story about her and speaks to her ghost even but making a paralel between extremely privileged white uni professor and a woman of color from the past falls a bit arrogant....
While thinking about herself and that American native victim of a femicide, Suzanne also loves two men, both good for nothing, except for gaslighting her, she loves them back with the devotion of a codependent partner who sees no value in her own existence, by that time the reader knows how privileged she already is, so we are left with the assumption that therapy is not popular in that city... Shame...painful to read most of the time but the good part is, that if a book like that can be printed, theb anyone can do anything...

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty decent writing but the storyline was terrible. There was attempt to contrast the two women as the same struggle and it didn't make much sense.