The Film Club

David Gilmour launches his new memoir, The Film Club, with This Is Not A Reading Series, presented by Pages Books & Magazines, Thomas Allen Publishers and EYE WEEKLY. Gilmour will appear in conversation with veteran broadcaster Ralph Benmergui.

The Film Club: From the 2005 winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the former national film critic for CBC television, David Gilmour, comes The Film Club, a delightful and absorbing memoir about the agonies and joys of home-schooling a beloved son.

Written in the spare elegant style for which he is known, The Film Club is the true story of Gilmour's decision to let his 15-year-old son drop out of high school on one condition: namely, that the boy agrees to sit down and watch three films a week with him. The book examines how those years ultimately enriched both their lives.

From the French New Wave, Kurosawa, and New German cinema, to film noir, Hitchcock, and Cronenberg, we read about key moments in each film as Gilmour struggles to teach his son about life and the vagaries of growing up through the power of the movies. Replete with page-turning descriptions of scenes and actors and directors, the narrative is framed with the tender story of his son's bittersweet first loves. The Film Club is a charming and poignant story about a special time in a father and son's relationship.

David Gilmour is a novelist who has earned critical praise from literary figures as diverse as William Burroughs and Northrop Frye, and from publications as different as the New York Times to People magazine. The author of six novels, he also hosted the award-winning Gilmour on the Arts. He lives in Toronto with his wife Tina Gladstone.

Ralph Benmergui, host of Benmergui in the Morning on JAZZ.FM91, has a long and varied broadcasting background. Over the last two decades, Canadians have come to know him as a television host and journalist who has appeared on both CBC radio and television, Current Affairs and Variety. He has won a prestigious Japan Prize for Best International Youth Programming.