| Vendor | |
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Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik |
| Original language | |
| English | |
THE VERY MARROW OF OUR BONES
Defiance, faith, and triumph in a heartrending debut novel about daughters and mothers.
In 1967, in the middle of a miserable November, two women disappear from the small working-class town of Fraser Arm. The community is thrown into panic as Alice McFee, the wife of the local gadabout Aloysius, and Bette Parsons, a mother of five, vanish without a trace. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a mute woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, has no information for the detectives who flood in from Vancouver in search of a murderer.
Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons knows something, though. There was a milk-stained note on the kitchen table. Wally, the note said, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life. Love Bette. Lulu carries her mother's note around for months while she and her family ¬ her dad, her Aunt Kat, and her brothers (the innocent Geordie, the twins, Ambrose and Alan, and her nemesis, Trevor) deal with their loss. Finally, Lulu takes one of her mother's jam jars and buries the note in the woods, under the tree fort. Then she forgets, or thinks she forgets. But the motherless child in her doesn't. At the age of ten, Lulu starts running. It takes her 50 years to stop.
Lulu lurches through her unraveled life as a childhood thief, then a nomadic fiddler, using the safety of solitude and detachment to avoid intimate connections, her family, and her home town until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who has carried a secret most of her life.
The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and the keeping of secrets. Hopeful, haunting, complex and comedic, this masterful debut novel will appeal to fans of Barbara Kingsolver, Miriam Toews, and Kate Atkinson.
Christine Higdon is a writer, editor, and graphic designer. Her writing has been shortlisted for the CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Marina Nemat Award at the University of Toronto. When she is not designing, editing, reading, or writing at her home in Ontario, Christine hooks rugs, worries about the bees, and longs for either ocean. The Very Marrow of Our Bones is her first novel. AUTHOR'S WEBSITE: www.christinehigdon.com
Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons knows something, though. There was a milk-stained note on the kitchen table. Wally, the note said, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life. Love Bette. Lulu carries her mother's note around for months while she and her family ¬ her dad, her Aunt Kat, and her brothers (the innocent Geordie, the twins, Ambrose and Alan, and her nemesis, Trevor) deal with their loss. Finally, Lulu takes one of her mother's jam jars and buries the note in the woods, under the tree fort. Then she forgets, or thinks she forgets. But the motherless child in her doesn't. At the age of ten, Lulu starts running. It takes her 50 years to stop.
Lulu lurches through her unraveled life as a childhood thief, then a nomadic fiddler, using the safety of solitude and detachment to avoid intimate connections, her family, and her home town until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who has carried a secret most of her life.
The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and the keeping of secrets. Hopeful, haunting, complex and comedic, this masterful debut novel will appeal to fans of Barbara Kingsolver, Miriam Toews, and Kate Atkinson.
Christine Higdon is a writer, editor, and graphic designer. Her writing has been shortlisted for the CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize and the Marina Nemat Award at the University of Toronto. When she is not designing, editing, reading, or writing at her home in Ontario, Christine hooks rugs, worries about the bees, and longs for either ocean. The Very Marrow of Our Bones is her first novel. AUTHOR'S WEBSITE: www.christinehigdon.com
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Book
Published by ECW Press |