Annabel Lyon

Annabel Lyon’s most recent novel, The Golden Mean (Random House Canada, 2009), animates the relationship between the young Alexander the Great and his tutor Aristotle. It won the 2009 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Annabel’s previous work includes the short fiction collection Oxygen (McClelland & Stewart, 2003), a suite of three novellas, The Best Thing for You (2004), and the juvenile novel, All-Season Edie (Orca Books, 2008). She lives in New Westminster, BC.

On the orders of his boyhood friend, now King Philip of Macedon, Aristotle postpones his dreams of succeeding Plato as leader of the Academy in Athens and reluctantly arrives in the Macedonian capital of Pella to tutor the king’s adolescent sons. An early illness has left one son with the intellect of a child; the other is destined for greatness but struggles between a keen mind that craves instruction and the pressures of a society that demands his prowess as a soldier.  Exploring this fabled time and place, Annabel Lyon tells her story in the earthy, frank, and perceptive voice of Aristotle himself. With sensual and muscular prose, she explores how Aristotle’s genius touched the boy who would conquer the known world.  And she reveals how we still live with the ghosts of both men.

Annabel Lyon read at the Parliamentary Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on September 16, 2010.

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