Cargo of Orchids

Susan Musgrave’s bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child.Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel’s wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme violence, she is fed drugs until she becomes addicted to cocaine and useless to her child. When she winds up on death row, it is because the evidence in her trial suggests she sacrificed her baby for drugs.Her narrative – violent and bizarre, but also riveting and erotic – runs parallel to an account of life in “Death Clinic” at the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women. A moving story emerges of the friendship of three female inmates who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner. There is humour and emotion in their lives, however harsh their stories. When Musgrave was asked how humour finds its way into such an unlikely place, she replied, “It’s a survival technique. People make jokes when they survive tragedies – that’s how they deal with the world.”In this novel about prison and drug culture, filled with brutality and injustices, the compassion we feel for the narrator lends the story a moral message: that nobody is so simply bad as to deserve the death sentence. As the Gazette commented, the book puts “a human face on convicted criminals,” makes us face squarely the issue of capital punishment and assess how we judge guilt, innocence and the ambiguous space in between. The Calgary Straight called the book “a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.” It’s also a book about unconditional love and how far we will go for it, according to Musgrave, who spent eight years writing this novel and knows plenty about prison life, having met and married her husband Stephen Reid during his incarceration in the 1980s. She had just finished a draft of the novel when Reid was arrested again following a bank robbery in 1999, just months after the CBC aired a Life and Times documentary about the couple.A brilliant mix of black humour, stark tragedy and poignant humanity, Cargo of Orchids is Musgrave’s first novel in over ten years. She has three times been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, once for fiction (The Charcoal Burners) and twice for poetry (A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury and Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries), and has published over twenty books. She likes novels with intense use of language and good plotting. “I want to give readers a harrowing ride,” she says. “I like to think of Cargo of Orchids as a suspense novel which is also an exploration of the heart.”From the Trade Paperback edition.Review“Susan Musgrave's third novel alternates between brutal emotion and raw, dark humour . . . . It's a beautiful, poetic book with a well-constructed plot and a conclusion with enough twists for a crime fiction novel.” — January Magazine“In the annals of death-house literature it’s rare that a novel leans on stand-up comedy. Susan Musgrave’s Cargo of Orchids does so brilliantly . . . . Cargo of Orchids is wonderful fun; terrifying, unforgettable and sui generis.” — *BC Bookworld“Tropical locales, illicit affairs, desperate escapes, cocaine addicts and hot sex scenes . . . . In a lyrical narrative sliced with dark graphic humour . . . Musgrave artfully turns up the tension as she twists the plot, humanizing the characters despite their ugly underbellies. It’s a disturbing but eloquent argument against incarceration and capital punishment.” — Chatelaine“[Musgrave] inhabits her subjects like a second skin, injecting them with a sad wisdom and complex sympathy.” — Elm Street Magazine“Musgrave’s poetic gift is evident in the powerful depiction of the island of Tranquilandia, where the narrator is held against her will. The reader feels the sweltering heat, flinches at the sound of scurrying rats and catches the penetrating scent of orchids.” — The Gazette* (Montreal)“In Cargo of Orchids, Musgrave has created an engaging and extremely moving story.” — Kitchener-Waterloo Record“Graphic in its depiction of what execution actually entails, Musgrave’s novel provides an effective protest against the calculated brutality of state-sanctioned murder, and the Death Rows that warehouse their human cargo for years on end. By placing this issue squarely in our faces, Cargo of Orchids, a novel laced with equal parts black humour and outright horror, succeeds in fulfilling a higher purpose.” — Times-Colonist (Victoria)“Her prose is lucid, eloquent and poetic. The tone of the piece is alternately despairing, ironic, erotic and fearful; the pacing of the narrative is perfectly tuned to the tension of the subject matter. This is a mature writer in her stride – giving the reader a taste of just how versatile her writing arsenal is when put to the test . . . . Cargo of Orchids is a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.” — Calgary Straight“A vivacious . . . compelling mélange of slapstick, dark humour and outlandish incident . . . . Perhaps the novel's greatest pleasures are aesthetic. Musgrave's depiction of perverse and dream-like Tranquilandia, where a stone pineapple spouts blood-coloured water, and tiny gold chains linked to fingernail studs make a woman's hands appear webbed, offers the delirious thrill of a vigorously imagined journey.” — *The Globe and MailPraise for *Things That Keep and Do Not Change“The poems here are often about loss and violation, but Musgrave’s characteristic mirth and penchant for harmless mischief keep breaking in. She conjures ghostly or violent images, but the comic muse is never far away.” — The Globe and Mail (Top 100 Books of 1999)Praise for *The Dancing Chicken“If there were an alternative to the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour – the Lenny Bruce award for Black Humour, perhaps – The Dancing Chicken should get it . . . . Read it and laugh. Nervously.” — The Gazette* (Montreal)“A tightly structured comedy of manners, all of whose many threads the author ravels and unravels with great skill. There are many large and small triumphs in The Dancing Chicken.” — Quill & Quire“The most consistently funny Canadian novel in years. Perversely dry humour that never misses the mark . . . . Musgrave's commendable range is matched by the precise quality of her writing.” — Vancouver Province“Musgrave shares with Tom Robbins a talent for redeeming mundanity by bringing in the lunatic fringe. Like Robbins, she is a verbal cartoonist, though her satire is more effervescent than the savage truth in the humour of Leacock and Haliburton.” — The Ottawa Citizen“This cleverly crafted picaresque novel is enough to make your head spin, your sides split. A bawdy, rollicking tale, broadstroked with Runyonesque characters offering acute insights. If you have friends starved for something really funny to read, you should gift-wrap this romp of a novel and shove it under the Christmas tree.” — Edmonton Journal“Musgrave would do anything rather than miss out on a chance to take a risk. [Her language is] deadpan, understated, full of non sequiturs, wisecracks, black humour and clever word-play.” — Times-Colonist (Victoria)“Musgrave approaches her subject in the manner of Salvador Dali – she distorts reality until it approximates her bizarre vision of the world.” — The Globe and MailPraise for *The Charcoal Burners“. . . powerful writing . . . irradiates the narrative like atomic particles. Musgrave is concerned with intimation of another world just below the glistening skin of life, where there awaits something unpalpable, dark, and unknowable.” — The Toronto Star“A thriller indeed, but one whose ghosts don't stay in the grave. Read this and weep – or laugh.” — Maclean's“Imagine Miss Lonelyhearts, the Bad Seed, She, and Animal Liberation all woven into one organic tale, with an ending from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” — The Hamilton Spectator“Engrossing and deeply affecting.” — Quill & Quire“Closest in vision to Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. The apocalyptic vision of Musgrave's first novel shows a ravaged country in dire need of new ghosts to believe in.” — The Gazette* (Montreal)“A riskier novel than Atwood’s The Edible Woman, more ambitious and visionary. When there is humour, it is blacker than charcoal.” — The Globe and Mail“Unquestionably an extraordinary book by an unquestionably gifted writer, The Charcoal Burners . . . proves that Susan Musgrave is destined to become a first-rate poet-novelist in the tradition of Margaret Atwood. [The Charcoal Burners] contains much of the brilliance and evocative power that typifies her best poetry.” — Vancouver Province“A powerful and disturbing vision of man at his worst – or best – and there are more than a few flashes of brilliance.” — The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)“Like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest or Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the net of madness Susan Musgrave weaves in The Charcoal Burners is an immense poetic swirling affair.” — Monday Magazine“This book is devastating. It will not leave you alone. The impact is similar to that of Edvard Munch’s The Cry, but poet Susan Musgrave paints with words, a bleak, apocalyptic vision of the human course.” — Calgary Herald“The Charcoal Burners is evidence of Musgrave's deep concern for people.” — The Kingston Whig-Standard“The sound of one hand slapping – B.C. poet Susan Musgrave's fictional hand slapping the reader's sensibilities – continues with shock after shock of gory violence through her first novel, The Charcoal Burners” — Ottawa Citizen“A stomach churner.” — Times-Colonist (Victoria) From the Inside FlapSusan Musgrave?s bestselling third novel, Cargo of Orchids, examines the life of a woman on death row in the United States. Our narrator recalls what brought her to this place, where she awaits the last of her appeals. We learn that along with her cellmates, Frenchy and Rainy, this Mother Without a Heart, otherwise known as the Cocaine Queen, has been sentenced to death for the crime of killing her child.Unlike the others, the narrator has not had a life marked by abuse and hardship. When her story begins, she is translating a book about the kidnapping of a woman connected to a drug cartel. At the book launch, she meets her husband-to-be, a lawyer. When their marriage fizzles out, she falls in love with one of his clients, Angel, a Colombian from a drug cartel family, imprisoned in British Columbia on a drug-smuggling charge. Pregnant, the narrator is taken hostage by Angel?s wife to a hot and squalid island off the coast of Colombia; in an atmosphere of extreme violence, she is fed drugs until she becomes addicted to cocaine and useless to her child. When she winds up on death row, it is because the evidence in her trial suggests she sacrificed her baby for drugs.Her narrative ? violent and bizarre, but also riveting and erotic ? runs parallel to an account of life in ?Death Clinic? at the Heaven Valley State Facility for Women. A moving story emerges of the friendship of three female inmates who share only the fact that they each have a date with the executioner. There is humour and emotion in their lives, however harsh their stories. When Musgrave was asked how humour finds its way into such an unlikely place, she replied, ?It?s a survival technique. People make jokes when they survive tragedies ? that?s how they deal with the world.?In this novel about prison and drug culture, filled with brutality and injustices, the compassion we feel for the narrator lends the story a moral message: that nobody is so simply bad as to deserve the death sentence. As the Gazette commented, the book puts ?a human face on convicted criminals,? makes us face squarely the issue of capital punishment and assess how we judge guilt, innocence and the ambiguous space in between. The Calgary Straight called the book ?a love letter to those who are serving time and the families who serve with them.? It?s also a book about unconditional love and how far we will go for it, according to Musgrave, who spent eight years writing this novel and knows plenty about prison life, having met and married her husband Stephen Reid during his incarceration in the 1980s. She had just finished a draft of the novel when Reid was arrested again following a bank robbery in 1999, just months after the CBC aired a Life and Times documentary about the couple.A brilliant mix of black humour, stark tragedy and poignant humanity, Cargo of Orchids is Musgrave?s first novel in over ten years. She has three times been nominated for the Governor General?s Award, once for fiction (The Charcoal Burners) and twice for poetry (A Man to Marry, a Man to Bury and Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries), and has published over twenty books. She likes novels with intense use of language and good plotting. ?I want to give readers a harrowing ride,? she says. ?I like to think of Cargo of Orchids as a suspense novel which is also an exploration of the heart.?