Original

About the author

Karen Hyatt

Karen Hyatt was born in Niagara Falls, Canada. She grew up a few miles from the famous falls, and spent many Sunday afternoons going for walks at Queen Victoria Park with her father, admiring the gardens and looking at the car licence plates from all over. From a young age she would not go near the river as she’d been told that water can draw you to it, and she still has a fear that somehow she’ll be tempted to jump in.
Karen began taking piano lessons when she was four years old and had the privilege of meeting concert pianist Isidor Philipp at her grandmother’s house when she was about five. She remembers playing the piano for him. Philipp would have been over ninety at the time. In the novel Uncovering Iris, Iris studies with Philipp in Paris. Karen was taught using the methods Philipp espoused at the Conservatoire in Paris – among them lots of ear training, playing with the metronome, and building equal strength in both hands. Karen continued to study the piano throughout her school years, earning a scholarship from the Bradley Institute and playing two concerts, one in Niagara Falls, New York, and one in Niagara Falls, Ontario. She subsequently taught piano at the Bradley Institute.
Karen spent most of her working life as an accountant, first with the federal government, and later with the provincial government. Between the two, she worked at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She has wanted to write a novel for a long time, and to that end she took a number of writing courses at Mohawk College in Hamilton where the encouragement she received convinced her that she could do this. She also took part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) four times, writing more than 50,000 words in the month of November each time. The ideas for Uncovering Iris had been teasing her for a long time, and the first NaNoWriMo exercise gave her the push to finally start putting these ideas in writing. Karen met interesting people during her courses at Mohawk, some of whom she still meets once or twice a year to discuss writing and life in general.
Karen and her husband Wayne are both retired and live in St. Catharines, Ontario. They own a property in Panama where they spend several months each year, and also like to travel to Europe and explore their home country, Canada. Panama is the setting for Karen’s second novel, which is nearing completion.

Karen has always been interested in what makes people tick. Why can some people rebound so quickly when things go wrong in their lives, while others are destroyed by similar events? What makes one person an optimist and another always see the bad in a situation? How much of the person we become is a direct result of our upbringing and how much is influenced by our own experiences?

Karen had a general idea of what she wanted to explore in the novel, but she was surprised to find that some of her characters had thoughts of their own and took the story off in new directions. This often seemed to occur on those nights when she was having difficulty sleeping. Her mind would work overtime it seemed, coming up with new angles, and even new names for characters. This was exciting and she would get up in the morning eager to write these new plot lines down before they could be forgotten. People whom Karen had known over her lifetime, and stories she had heard from others, inspired some of her characters and some of the plot, but the novel is purely a work of fiction. These events did not occur anywhere other than in the author’s imagination.

About the book

Stella, adopted at birth, moves from England to Canada following the death of her adoptive parents and the discovery that her live-in boyfriend is gay. On the plane to Toronto she meets Madeleine, whose offer of help to this young and naïve stranger ushers in a remarkable series of events for both women—almost all of which, it transpires, revolve around a woman they do not know they share a deep connection to: Iris Parker.

Intertwining the family sagas of each of its main characters, Uncovering Iris lifts the lid on each of their lives and the circumstances that have shaped them. Spanning many generations of families in twentieth-century Canada, the novel pays particular attention to the fates of women in a dangerously patriarchal world.

With deep insight and compassion, author Karen Hyatt tells the stories of the hardened protagonist, Iris, and those of the many people she has hurt, hindered, and harried in her life as a strong-willed and defiant single woman. What causes a person to become who they are? How do life events change a personality? How can we come to terms with the way we are treated by others, including those whom we love? These are just some of the questions asked and explored in this engaging first novel.