Book Information

From some accidents of love and weather we never quite recover. At the worst of the Prairie dust bowl of the 1930s, a young man appears out of a blizzard and alters the lives of two sisters. His disarming presence in a family adept at making do throws into relief a rivalry that sets the stage for all that follows in a narrative spanning just over thirty years. The story begins in Saskatchewan and moves, in the decades following the war, to Ottawa and New York City. The characters are at once eccentric and familiar. Among them, the worldly, unreliable Maurice Dove; Ernest Hardy, a stubbornly honest, embittered farmer; his favourite daughter, Lucinda, fastidious and reserved; and her younger sister, bold Norma Joyce, tricky and tenacious, at first a strange, dark, self-possessed child, later a woman who learns something of self-forgiveness and of the redemptive nature of art. Hers is a story about the mistakes we make that never go away, about how things we want to keep vanish and things we want to lose return to haunt us.