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list price: $14.99
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback
category: Fiction
published: Feb 2011
ISBN:9781926741512
publisher: TouchWood Editions

The Maquinna Line

A Family Saga

by Norma Macmillan

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Description

A murder, a tryst, a mysterious child. A Victoria aristocrat who obsesses over her Churchill relatives. A repressive Welsh mother with a royalty fixation. A once-carefree Hesquiat girl from Nootka Sound. A dashing Icelandic philanderer. And quiet, steady Julia Godolphin, trying to rise above it all. The lost novel of Norma Macmillan, the Vancouver actress who lived much of her life in New York and Hollywood, is the work of a woman steeped in the American entertainment industry but deeply in love with the history of her native province, which eventually drew her home before her death in 2001.

The Maquinna Line: A Family Saga is set on Vancouver Island from 1871 to 1945, with a nod to the meeting of Captain Cook and Chief Maquinna in 1778. It traces the stories of the five families of varied social standing, including two descendents of Chief Maquinna. In the end, they’re all ordinary people trying to find happiness in the face of intrigue, ambition, misunderstanding and changing social and sexual mores.

About the Author

Norma Macmillan had a wide-ranging career in the arts, including the production of her plays, Crowded Affair and Free as a Bird, in the 1950s and 1960s by BC's groundbreaking Totem Theatre and New Jersey's famed Grist Mill Playhouse. But she is best known as the actress who was the voice of television's Gumby and Casper the Friendly Ghost. The Maquinna Line began when the family lived at Sunset Boulevard's legendary Chateau Marmont. Norma continued to work on the book after she and her husband, Thor Arngrim, returned to Vancouver, but it languished in the back of a closet after she died in 2001, at the age of 79. Thor and veteran Vancouver writer Charles Campbell revived it, and it is a tribute to an old-fashioned storytelling tradition that respects history but isn't afraid to enliven it.

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