She wasn't looking for love. As a successful writer with an established career, a comfortable home and a supportive group of friends, her life was full. But then, 30 years after he broke her heart the first time, he walked into a book signing and back into her life. Spurred on by the idyll of a first love made good, they reconnect through emails - the bits and bytes of their messages transforming into a real electricity between them. He is smitten. She is enthralled.
At A Loss For Words is another compelling (and hilarious!) expression of Governor General's award-winner Diane Schoemperlen's gift for building the minutiae of everyday life into a profound understanding of women, men, love and imagination.
Coming next month: Salvage by Jane F. Kotapish
Calling to mind Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and the earlier fiction of Margaret Atwood, this electrifying international debut takes us on an exhilarating, disturbing, darkly witty journey through the passages of hidden memory.
After witnessing a horrific accident, a thirty-seven-year-old woman flees her fast-paced life in New York City and buys a Victorian house in the Virginia countryside, seeking recovery through solitude and stillness. Yet, as she confronts the quiet of her own company, she finds herself entertaining an old childhood obsession. As she watches her own mother, poised on the cusp between eccentricity and madness, she must decide what she will be able to recoup from that childhood, and what she is capable of throwing away.
Written from the point of view of its unnamed protagonist, Salvage captures the subtle and sometimes disastrous ways in which mothers and daughters find and lose one another, time and again.
First published in Chatelaine.com's April 2008 issue.
© Rogers Publishing Ltd.
