Fall On Your Knees and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more



or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Start reading Fall On Your Knees on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Fall On Your Knees (Oprah's Book Club) [Paperback]

Ann-Marie MacDonald
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (620 customer reviews)

List Price: $16.00
Price: $12.81 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $3.19 (20%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it Tuesday, May 21? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition $10.38  
Hardcover --  
Paperback $12.81  
Mass Market Paperback --  
Audio, CD, Bargain Price $14.78  
Unknown Binding --  
Audible Audio Edition, Abridged $20.95 or Free with Audible 30-day free trial
Image
Save on Popular Books This Summer
Browse our Bookshelf Favorites store for big savings on popular fiction, nonfiction, children's books, and more.

Book Description

January 24, 2002
The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. At the eye of the storm is one secret that threatens to shake their lives -- even destroy them.

Set on stormy Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed multigenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world filled with driving ambition, inescapable family bonds, and forbidden love.

Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.


Special Offers and Product Promotions

  • Sign up to be notified by email when the next Oprah's Book Club® pick is announced and available for pre-order.


Frequently Bought Together

Fall On Your Knees (Oprah's Book Club) + Drowning Ruth: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) + Whistling In the Dark
Price for all three: $38.00

Buy the selected items together


Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A sprawling saga about five generations of a family from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is the impressive first fiction from Canadian playwright and actor Ann-Marie MacDonald. This epic tale of family history, family secrets, and music centers on four sisters and their relationships with each other and with their father. Set in the coal-mining communities of Nova Scotia in the early part of this century, the story also shifts to the battlefields of World War I and the jazz scene of New York City in the 1920s.

From Booklist

A family pays the wages of lust in this memorable first novel, for it is most often lust that leads to unsuitable if not unholy couplings in the Piper family of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in the early part of this century. Eighteen-year-old piano tuner James Piper is so smitten with 12-year-old Materia Mahmoud that he entices her from her traditional Lebanese family to marry him. Before she's 14 the untutored Materia gives birth to Kathleen, the beautiful and gifted child whom she is unable to love but whom James takes to his heart. There are more daughters: Mercedes, the good girl who becomes the little mother; Other Lily, who dies unbaptized when one day old; Frances, the bad girl who becomes a bawdy entertainer and worse; and Kathleen's daughter, Lily, the saintly crippled girl who will learn the secrets and find resolution and redemption. Actress-playwright MacDonald is a talented storyteller with a crisp yet lilting prose style that captures equally well the atmospheres of World War I trenches and Harlem jazz clubs. Michele Leber

Product Details

  • Paperback: 512 pages
  • Publisher: Touchstone; 1st Scribner Paperback Fiction Ed edition (January 24, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0743237188
  • ISBN-13: 978-0743237185
  • Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1.1 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (620 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #232,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

The story and character development are complex and well executed. Rebecca  |  94 reviewers made a similar statement
When I read this book, I could not put it down. Deanne Kelley  |  74 reviewers made a similar statement
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
128 of 133 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Bizarre Page Turner February 23, 2002
Format:Paperback
The only way that I can describe Fall on Your Knees is to compare it to a car accident. You don't want to look, but you can't stop yourself. The story of the Piper family is one of sadness, perversion, and well kept secrets. The writing is excellent, though the reader may find themselves confused at times. Some things are written like riddles, that leave you wondering if what you read means what you think it means. Keep reading..as the story unfolds, answers are revealed and things clarified. This is definitely a dark book, so prepare yourself, but it also is a page turner. This book is hard to put down, because you will want to know where is it going, why? What does this all mean? After completing it, I'm still trying to figure out if I liked it? But there is no question, the writing is supreme and the characters are still with me. That's good writing.
Was this review helpful to you?
78 of 83 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Oprah has made a good choice January 24, 2002
By Perry
Format:Paperback
This book, recommended to me by one of my college students, is one of those novels you can simply dive into and lose yourself in. Although I also read, and enjoy, punchy, sardonic, razor-edge writing like "The Corrections" (Franzen) and "White Noise" (DeLillo), this book is far from those styles. It's an old-fashioned "good read," focusing deeply on each character and twisting them around one another in endless ways.
There is obsession here, the darkest kind, and yet the book is also, in places, heartbreaking in its compassion for the characters. The most interesting of the four sisters, to me, was Frances. Mostly because her spinning out of control was unlike any I've read before. Her longing and misery, and her many idiosyncrasies, make her an unforgettable character.

The story of the parents in this story is so dismal in spots, that it brought to mind "Angela's Ashes," though the plot is nothing close.
I think that what makes this book stand apart from other good reads is the feeling that the author truly came to love her characters. And the story is so multi-faceted and surprising that it fully earns its 500-plus pages.
Great book. I haven't read many of "Oprah's" book club choices, but I applaud her on this choice.

Was this review helpful to you?
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking, Riveting, Difficult January 24, 2001
Format:Paperback
I just finished this book last night. Rarely do I read a book that I am unable to put down. But immediately upon reading the first chapter, I found myself submerged in the world of Cape Breton and the Piper family. It wasn't the plot that kept me reading (until the last 2 sections); it was the writing, the language, the sheer intensity, passion and power of the book.

This is not an easy book to read. People do horrible things to each other - and to themselves - in this book. But, unlike some modern novels I have read and DISLIKED (e.g. Book of Ruth), there is redemption at the end. And I think that is important.

I see the heart of this novel as being about what it means to be a family. It's about the stories that families create, and how those stories define a family. And, in the end, how it is love that creates a family. Not marriage, not birth, not religion. Love, with all its messiness and selfishness, purity and desire and hope.

Other reviewers have described the language of this story. I do not find it overdone. It seems to me that MacDonald uses it carefully, expertly, respectful of its power, unleashing its intensity when appropriate.

If you are disturbed by stories about dysfunctional families or unconventional relationships, don't read this book. If you are willing to leave your body for a few days and immerse yourself in another world, if you are willing to be angered, amused, and touched to your core, then buy this book, and read it soon.

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully Written but Incredibly Disturbing Material
This is one book I wish I had never read. It is horrifying material that I am trying to wash out of my brain. Read more
Published 3 days ago by Deanne
1.0 out of 5 stars Don't Waste Your Time
I belong to a local book club, and this was April's, so I did finish it. Worst book I ever read; very DARK.
Full of predjudice, abuse, incest, etc. Read more
Published 7 days ago by Irish Girl
4.0 out of 5 stars Wow...
What a book. It made me sad...and happy...and mad. The ending was a bit blah, but I'd read it again.
Published 7 days ago by Ellie Green
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, I love the suspense and using the future and the past to...
I dislike how vague the narrator expressed incest, almost like a suspense story. The reader had to figure out what happened.
Published 1 month ago by sandra lewis
5.0 out of 5 stars you must read Fall on Your Knees!
Fall on Your Knees is the unraveling tale of a seemingly "normal" family. The twists and turns in the life of this family are constant and captivating to the reader. Read more
Published 1 month ago by sharon c.jernigan
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the finest writers of our time.
There is no doubt that this book contains some pretty harsh subject matter.Many people may find it too difficult to read. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Roberta Kagan author of "All My Love, Detrick"
2.0 out of 5 stars Regret...
I didn't like this book at all. It honestly made no sense. It arrived at the last possible day, too. I needed it for my book club and I couldn't read it because I had no time. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Miranda K.
4.0 out of 5 stars Very Hard to Review
I found this book very difficult to review because it is so dark and twisted, and the way that things are revealed throughout the book left me wondering-is that really what she... Read more
Published 1 month ago by S. Schwartz
5.0 out of 5 stars Twistedly Wowed!!
This book made my top 5 favorite books of all time, which is odd because 3 are romance novels and one is non-fiction!! I LOVED IT!! Read more
Published 2 months ago by Jen
1.0 out of 5 stars Depressing, sad, pitiful
How much more can happen to these poor people? Every cliched tragedy is here: incest, rape, death, murder, war, violence, greed--you name it, they suffer it--way too much.
Published 3 months ago by Jeanne
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Forums

Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions

Topic From this Discussion
Who is Pete?
"Pete" is the name she gave the scarecrow that her father posted outside in her mother's garden. When Kathleen was a child, she had nightmares that Pete came to life and hunted her, and these nightmare images became "visions" to her during the scariest or most troubling times... Read more
Jun 18, 2008 by Truth in Fiction |  See all 5 posts
Best historical novel
Here are some of my favorite historical fiction novels:

Innocent Traitor

Stealing Athena

Leonardo's Swans

The Girl with the Pearl Earring

The Tea Rose

Gone with the Wind

The Birth of Venus

Pillars of the Earth

Annette Vallon

Here be Dragons

The Sunne of Splendour
Apr 20, 2010 by Jane Doe |  See all 4 posts
Im lost...
Frances had decided that Leo/Ginger was the father of Lily and Ambrose. She wanted to give Lily her brother back.

Mercedes was a religious whackjob who thought that having an illegitimate child was bad enough, but a black illegitimate one was even worse. She gave the baby away for the same... Read more
Apr 19, 2009 by Anna M. Ligtenberg |  See all 2 posts
sisuusysydhdydjyy... zsycxckxszfszfv7xfuv Be the first to reply
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 






Look for Similar Items by Category