Amy’s Journey is the story of a young girl, who at the age of twelve, is diagnosed with tuberculosis and becomes a patient in a Sanatorium. While on the road to recovery, she copes with a sudden death in her family which ultimately leads to an acute awareness of her “illegitimate” birth. Amy faces the challenges of her struggle for physical and emotional health with perseverance and determination.

Amy’s Journey is the true-life story of the author, Lillian Bursey, told through the eyes of the character, Amy.

Recipient – 2010 Newfoundland Writers’ Guild Certificate of Achievement

In this, her second book, Catherine Black weaves together the wonder, heartache, and “unlovely beauty” of a youth that is by turns charmed and disquieting. Straddling genres of memoir, prose, and poetry, A Hard Gold Thread delights in the layering of keenly observed moments, in the subtle play of remembering and forgetting, and in the shift in perspective brought to bear on memory as it is transmuted by time. Reverent, sensitively rendered, and sometimes tongue in cheek, A Hard Gold Thread is an unconventional memoir inviting the reader into a meditation on the engulfing beauty of the world and the compulsion to turn away from it.

This autobiographical novel traces the journey of a woman from her youth in Socialist Eastern Europe to her transplanted life in Montreal, Canada. She is a precocious, thoughtful child, whose early life in Romania is marked by the scarcities of the time and the political games needed to survive, but she is not unhappy. Placed around her family’s house are hives—the bees discourage the secret police from visiting too often—and the bees provide both a childish diversion and an overarching metaphor for departure and home. An elegant, candid book, A Cemetery for Bees is an elegy for childhood, a declaration of francophile love, and a complicated look at who we are, who we were, and where we might find ourselves.

6 Essential Questions tells the story of Renata as she travels to Brazil to reunite with the mother who abandoned her when she was just five years old. In Rio, Renata discovers more than she bargained for in her quest to uncover the truth of who abandoned whom. She is continually tossed about by her undead grandmother and a semi-invisible uncle as they choreograph the ultimate dance of mother and daughter, both of whom must confront their dreams before they can ever attempt to confront each other. Imaginations run wild in this strangely beautiful and funny story loosely based on Uppal’s critically acclaimed memoir, Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother, a finalist for both the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.