Showing results by author "Marina Endicott" in All Categories

In a moment of self-absorption, Clara Purdy's life takes a sharp left turn when she crashes into a beat-up car carrying an itinerant family of six. The Gage family had been travelling to a new life in Fort McMurray, but bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer rather than remnants of the accident. Recognizing their need as her responsibility, Clara tries to do the right thing and moves the children, husband, and horrible grandmother into her own house - then has to cope with the consequences of practical goodness.

When Julia arrives in Medway, accompanying her beloved Hardy on his first posting as an RCMP constable, she tries to explain her new life to old friends from the city, but can find no shared vocabulary to convey this rural reality, let alone police life. As Hardy disappears into long days at work, Julia takes a job as editor of the local newspaper, the Observer. Interviewing people to compose a view of the town each week, she gathers knowledge of the community’s surface joys and sorrows; meanwhile, Hardy is immersed in violence and loss, and Julia can only witness his increasing exhaustion.

Close to Hugh is a glorious, exuberant, poignant comic novel about youth and age, art and life, love and death - and about losing your mind and finding your heart's desire over the course of seven days one September. As the week opens, 50-something Hugh Argylle, owner of the Argylle Art Gallery, has a jarring fall from a ladder - a fall that leaves him with a fractured off-kilter vision of his own life and the lives of his friends, who are going through crises that leave them despairing and afraid.

Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea returns to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay too embarks on a life-changing voyage to the other side of the world.

The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is 16 when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous headstrong sprite Bella, who is 13. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but slowly and steadily evolve into true artists.