The women of What's in a Name
Garie McIntosh, author of What's in a Name
About the novel
In Canada and Jamaica, these silent women of What’s in a Name can no longer remain so. You will be mesmerized by this epic tale that details each woman’s shocking justification for her own silence. The main character, Christine/Lena, trades “bridling herself with her secret for some breaking news of her own.”
Each woman’s name is like the cover art that wraps to the back of the book, suggesting that names are rooted in something that will become a revelation, even if such truth is trivialized or set down to “the effect of breeze having manipulated leaves into form; leaves having manipulated light with equal savvy.”
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
—Khaled Hosseini
The women have spoken, and they must be heard. But for one of them, Dell-Dell, speaking by itself isn’t enough, nor is her name, so she commits an unspeakable act to solidify her future and a new life by way of a new name. She reminds us that every woman knows her own sorrows.
What’s in a Name was written by Garie McIntosh in “the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth,” something Khaled Hosseini once said about fiction itself.
Now part of the forthcoming The Barred-spiral Trilogy
The 2021 version of the novel, coming at the end of July, will form a series of inter-related novels in a thematic trilogy called “The Barred-spiral Trilogy,” which is named for comparing a mother’s influence to what happens, the motions, in a spiral galaxy that has a central bar-shaped structure.