Second Ignatieff family tale set for earlier spring release

Editors at Penguin Group Canada have put an upcoming Michael Ignatieff book on the fast track, according to a newspaper report.

In December, various media reported that the new Liberal leader was completing work on an upcoming family memoir entitled True Patriot Love: Four Generations in Search of Canada, slated for release April 28.

According to a report in the Globe and Mail Wednesday, Ignatieff submitted his final write-up for the book on Jan. 5 and the publisher has pushed the release date up to April 21.

The book will emerge just days before the next Liberal leadership convention, slated to take place April 30 to May 3.

Though the publisher has assigned "extra care and extra people onto the copy editing and the proofreading," Penguin editorial director Diane Turbide told the Globe that editing has been light because "Michael's a beautiful writer a very concise writer" and "he matched every deadline we asked him to."

Ignatieff, a historian, former journalist, broadcaster and lecturer, has written or co-written more than a dozen tomes on a variety of subjects, from A Just Measure of Pain: Penitentiaries in the Industrial Revolution to a biography of philosopher Isaiah Berlin to Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond.

He is a past Governor General Literary Award-winner (non-fiction) for The Russian Album, which explores his Russian paternal ancestry. He also nabbed nominations for the U.K.'s prestigious Booker Prize and the former Whitbread Award for his second novel, Scar Tissue.

Inspired by a cross-Canada trip Ignatieff took with his wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar, nearly a decade ago, True Patriot Love chronicles predecessors on Ignatieff's maternal side, including great-grandfather George Monro Grant, who travelled with Sir Sandford Fleming in the late 19th century to map the route for the Canadian Pacific Railway, as well as William L. Grant, who served as a principal of Upper Canada College, and George P. Grant,political thinker and author of Lament for a Nation.

A French-language version of the new title will be released simultaneously by publisher Boral.