This post is published to coincide with the anniversary of the author’s death. She died in her home in Toronto on July 12, 1961, where she had written the final Jalna book, Centenary at Jalna. Even though I deliberately chose a story-order reading, over a publication-order
Event hosted by Kaggsy's Ramblings Stuck in a Book #1977Club So much good women's fiction from 1977, from Margaret Atwood's Dancing Girls to Marilyn French's The Women's Room. But I reread Carol Shields' Unless last year and I wanted to reread another of hers. Enter, The
In which there is talk of the slim stories which have travelled with me within the city, while bulkier volumes stayed home. Charles Dickens' Bleak House and John Ajvide Lindqvist's Harbor (Translated by Marlaine Delargy) are awkward travelling companions. As are some of the skinnies in my current stack,
The widow has let her hair go. It is half mahogany and half dull grey. Not only grey, but dull grey. Paola and Renata's listening that summer One has the sense that being a widow might have brought this about. The simple act of inhabiting widowhood. But that
It begins in darkness. South side of the Luxembourg Gardens "Louise, my sister, talked to Sylvie Laval for the first time on the stairs of our hotel on a winter afternoon. At five o’clock the skylight over the stairway and the blank, black windows on each of the
