To Whom It May Concern

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Hardev Dange is suffering through a tumultuous year. He’s just been informed that the bank is going to foreclose on his house. His fickle daughter Birendra is on the verge of marriage, his son Emile is studying curses (while falling in love with a fellow male grad student),and his younger daughter, Dorothy, who’s deaf, is working at a tattoo and body piercing parlour and collecting stories from the older men languishing at her local hangout. And because he’s confined to a wheelchair, Hardev is dependent on his homecare worker, the kleptomaniac Rodriguez, to help him devise a plan to keep house and home together. In this modern, multicultural re-telling of Shakespeare’s King Lear, Priscila Uppal explores the vulnerability and complexity of family and inheritance. She exposes the tragic and comedic dimensions of our failures to communicate, of keeping secrets—especially from family—and the consequences of our betrayals. With the depth of her perception and fine eye for detail, Priscila Uppal’s To Whom It May Concern is a refreshing take on love, compassion and torment. In this grand saga with its vivid portrayal of characters held hostage by their fate and fortune, everyone has an opinion, but few keep it to themselves—except when it really counts.

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Priscila Uppal is a Canadian poet and fiction writer born in Ottawa in 1974. Among her publications are five collections of poetry: How to Draw Blood From a Stone (1998), Confessions of a Fertility Expert (1999), Pretending to Die (2001), Live Coverage (2003), and Ontological Necessities (2006);and the novel The Divine Economy of Salvation (2002), published to critical acclaim in five countries. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, and Ontological Necessities was short-listed for the prestigious Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. She has a PhD in English Literature and is a professor of English at York University in Toronto. For more information please visit priscilauppal.ca.