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Product Description

The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them.

Set on stormy Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed multigenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world filled with driving ambition, inescapable family bonds, and forbidden love.

Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21733 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Released on: 2002-01-24
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Amazon.com Reviews
A sprawling saga about five generations of a family from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is the impressive first fiction from Canadian playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. This epic tale of family history, family secrets, and music centers on four sisters and their relationships with each other and with their father. Set in the coal-mining communities of Nova Scotia in the early part of this century, the story also shifts to the battlefields of World War I and the jazz scene of New York City in the 1920s.

The New York Times Book Review, John Motyka
The Canadian actress and playwright Ann-Marie MacDonald writes of several generations of a Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, family in this resonant first novel... Ms. MacDonald skillfully shifts the story backward and forward in time, giving it a mythic quality that allows dark, half-buried secrets to be gracefully and chillingly revealed.

From AudioFile
Ann-Marie MacDonald's family saga, set on Nova Scotia's Cape Breton Island and published in 1996, is enjoying a deserved renaissance since being stamped with the Oprah symbol. It's an unforgettable novel that deserves more than one reading, and this recording is an enjoyable way to revisit it. But the abridgment, while fine as these things go, cuts out so much of the novel's intricacy that it won't do for a reader's first foray into MacDonald's world. Nikki James has to contend with sprinklings of Gaelic and Lebanese, but other than a few cloying voices (always children or men) and her inability to correctly pronounce blancmange, she's comfortable with the text. It's just too bad there isn't more of it. D.B. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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Customer Reviews

What is wrong with Oprah?
This was a very strange, disgusting book. It was well written, however. I just don't like reading about incest. Why did Oprah hail this as being such a good novel? I am just bothered by the whole book.

I love this book.....
With eloquent words, and an intricately passionate story, this book took me into a whole new world. While some books I read pass through my memory through the years, this book will always stay in my mind.

Beautifully written
I read the reviews before I started reading the book. I wish I had not...
This book is very well written. However it is not for speedreaders. I found myself having to read every single word just to appreciate it the way it deserved.

Overall it was a great read. I grew very interested early in the book with the characters. They are very different and unique from each other and although the book is very dark it is not thrown out in your face. It is described and written all very subtly...

I would recommend it...but only to people who I know would appreciate it.