Chrissie Crosby is young, split-second smart and completely pissed off at just about everything. Ginger Flynn is pushing eighty and still seeking answers the way wise people do. These two have much to show each other. Years earlier, a charismatic young professor, Nigel Childes, captivated Ginger while she was one of his students. Their furtive romance and eventual wedding appalled Ginger’s disapproving parents, resulting in the family home, Stone House, falling into the hands of a questionable religious sect. After a dozen years of marriage, inexplicably, Nigel left his pregnant wife and child and was lost to them for what seemed like forever. The daughter, Irene, suffered deep wounds inflicted by her father’s abandonment. Her brother Peter was burdened by guilt and sorrow from a tragic accident for which he still blames himself. He and Chrissie will enact an unconventional confession and communion, as will Ginger and her daughter. As climax to a tumultuous year, Professor Childes reappears, knocking everything off kilter. Observing from the sidelines, Shep, border collie extraordinaire, maintains the bemused detachment appropriate for most human affairs. With short chapters and point of view shifting among the characters, this is a story of compassion and forgiveness and the intimate connectedness of birth and death.

Des Kennedy is a novelist, essayist and veteran back-to-the-lander. The author of nine previous books, in both fiction and non-fiction, he has been three times nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. He’s contributed many articles on environmental issues, gardening and rural living to a wide variety of publications in Canada and the United States, and has been featured on numerous regional and national television and radio programs. A celebrated speaker, known for his passion and irreverent wit, he’s performed at conferences, schools, festivals, botanical gardens, art galleries, garden shows and wilderness gatherings. Active for many years in environmental and social justice issues, he was an organizer of the successful civil disobedience campaign in Strathcona Provincial Park in 1988 and was recognized as a key supporter in the struggle to save Clayoquot Sound. In the ’70s and early ’80s, he lived and worked with two First Nations bands attempting to defend their traditional territories in north-central B.C. against industrial clear-cutting. In the ’90s he was a founding director of a successful community land trust on Denman Island. Des and his partner Sandy live a conserver lifestyle in their hand-built house surrounded by gardens and woodlands.

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“Warm, witty, wise, and beautifully written, this is an engaging and powerful novel that haunts the reader long after the last page is turned.”—Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

“This is a big, brilliant, very funny, tragic and redemptive novel where multiple worlds keep colliding, always with extraordinary and surprising results . . . a new kind of story that brings together old and new Canada in masterful ways. Des Kennedy is one terrific storyteller.”—Lorna Goodison, Jamaica’s Poet Laureate & author of From Harvey River