Fall on your Knees

Fall on Your Knees (1996), first-time novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald’s ambitious multigenerational family saga set in the early decades of the 20th century, moves from the bleak coastal towns of Canada’s Cape Breton Island to the bustling New York City of the Jazz Era. Recalling both the psychological richness of William Faulkner’s family sagas set in Yoknapatawpha County and the dark passions in the Gothic tales of Flannery O’Connor, Fall on Your Knees follows three very different sisters, Kathleen, Mercedes, and Frances Piper, and their struggle to find the sanctity and dignity promised by their Catholic faith in a lurid world of violence, greed, and aberrant lust. In the interrelated stories of the Piper clan, the novel investigates The Urgency of Sexuality, The Corrosive Effects of Secrets, The Terrifying Immediacy of Death, and The Conflict Between Flesh and Spirit. Fall on Your Knees is widely regarded as a work of magical realism.

The novel was an immediate sensation and became an international best-seller translated into more than 20 languages. It earned the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Novel, as well as the Canadian Writers Association Prize for Best Novel. In addition, it was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize, awarded annually for the best book released by a Canadian publisher. Six years after its publication, the novel found renewed popularity when it was selected by Oprah’s Book Club. In 2015, the novel was adapted into a four-part television miniseries by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

This study guide references the 2005 Touchstone paperback edition. 

Content Warning: The novel contains graphic depictions of violence, including combat, death by suicide, and medical trauma. It also details pedophilia, sexual assault, incest, and rape. In addition, it depicts incidents of racial intolerance and bigotry, anti-gay bias, and the effects of drug and alcohol addiction.

Plot Summary

At the turn of the 20th century, James Piper, a self-taught piano tuner, arrives on the remote island of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia certain he can make a good living. He meets 13-year-old Materia Mahmoud while tuning her family’s piano. They elope, incurring the wrath of Materia’s conservative Lebanese family. When Materia delivers their first child, Kathleen, James loses interest in his wife and dotes on the baby girl. Materia suspects James’s obsession might be toxic. Despite having three additional daughters (Mercedes, Frances, and Lily, who dies of crib death—now known as sudden infant death syndrome), James fixates on Kathleen, who develops a remarkable talent for singing. James is certain she has a future in opera.

Fearing that his sexual interest in his daughter might be dangerous, James volunteers to serve overseas in World War I. However, when he returns impacted by what he has witnessed, he cannot shake his obsession with Kathleen. He sends her to New York to study music. Months later, James receives an anonymous letter saying that Kathleen was engaging in reckless living. James heads to New York, storms into Kathleen’s apartment, and finds her making love to a Black man. He pulls the man off his daughter and, enraged and aroused, rapes her. The two return to Cape Breton. Within weeks, Kathleen finds herself pregnant.

After keeping the pregnancy secret, Kathleen dies delivering twins: Ambrose and Lily. Ambrose drowns when Kathleen’s sister Frances tries to baptize him in a creek; Lily, survives, but contracts polio after Frances dips her into the fetid creek also. Days later, Materia, overcome with grief, dies by suicide. James begins a lucrative business as a bootlegger.

Frances grows up to be a rebel, getting expelled from school. Mercedes takes up the work of a mother, determined to raise the Piper clan. She has neither the time nor the inclination for romance and abandons her dream of college. Frances is drawn to Lily, who is raised believing that Materia is her mother. Lily, for her part, worships Frances. Lily comes to believe her dead twin is her guardian angel and that she is gifted with spiritual powers.

Frances decides to run away to make money to take Lily to the healing shrine at Lourdes in France. Frances becomes a singer and, despite her age, a part-time sex worker at a club run by her maternal uncle. Frances becomes fascinated by Teresa, the Mahmoud family’s Black maid, and by Teresa’s married brother Leo Taylor (nicknamed Ginger). Believing that Ginger is the father of her dead sister’s twins, Frances decides to corrupt Ginger to punish him. Frances seduces him in a cave that is part of the island’s abandoned mine system. When Teresa finds out, she shoots the now-pregnant Frances in the belly. But she does not kill the baby, and Frances survives.

The delivery is difficult. Frances, in and out of consciousness, is told that the baby, whom she has already named Aloysius, has died. She is devastated, and returns home and seeks her father’s forgiveness. The two become close, much to the chagrin of Mercedes.

James, by this time, is a successful bootlegger. Mercedes runs the house with a joyless commitment. She is forced to take care of James after he has two debilitating strokes. Meanwhile, Frances learns that her son did not die at childbirth: Mercedes, determined to save the family’s reputation and worried about raising a child of diverse racial heritage during a time when multiracial relationships are illegal, bundled Aloysius (whom she renamed Ambrose) off to a distant Catholic orphanage for “coloured” children.

James gives Frances the diary Kathleen kept during her time in New York. The diary recounts Kathleen’s months of training to audition for the Metropolitan Opera Company and how she fell in love with a Black jazz pianist named Rose LaCroix. The affair was hot and steamy (Rose dressing like a man whenever they made the rounds of the speakeasies)—it was Rose that James had found in bed with Kathleen. Frances confronts James, now near death, and he confesses everything. He dies days later. Frances sends Lily, now 16, to New York to track down Rose, now a famous pianist who passes as a man. They form an immediate friendship, and Lily also bonds with Rose’s mother, a white woman with a heroin addiction.

Frances tells Mercedes about Kathleen’s rape. Mercedes cannot believe she has given up her life to help her morally depraved father. Frances and Mercedes live together for years. Frances dies before Mercedes can tell her that her son Aloysius/Ambrose is still alive.

In New York, a young Black man who identifies himself as Anthony Piper visits Lily and Rose, now living together. He carries a gift from Mercedes, who contacted him through the orphanage after Frances’s death and gave him an illustrated family tree that Mercedes created. The tree lays out the secret relationships, illegitimate births, deaths by suicide, and violent deaths that define the Piper family, including Anthony’s own story. Lily, overcome by emotion, welcomes Anthony and begins to tell him the story of his family.