At the end of the Second World War nearly 50,000 women emigrated to Canada from Britain and the continent, scarred from the bomb-rutted fields of Europe. For them that Atlantic crossing marked the beginning of a great adventure: a new country, a new life and a new husband. For many children of these unions came a dual heritage, a cultural divide that made “home” a difficult place to define.

In Old Stones, the gap between A. S. Penne’s privileged English and provincial Canadian backgrounds is made achingly clear in family stories from both continents. In the end, the author does indeed find home — where she least expects it. An unsentimental look at a war-time union, Old Stones is an inquiry into a woman’s two very different selves, as well as a candid examination of a cultural divide.

A born-and-bred West Coaster, A. S. Penne lives at the edge of the Strait of Georgia in Sechelt. British Columbia, where she writes and teaches. Her writing has won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, from the Ian St. James Awards in the U.K. (1994 and 1995) and the Writer’s Digest in The U.S. (1994). In Canada, she was a finalist in the prestigious Western Magazine Awards (2000) and was given honorable mention by the judges of the Norman Epstein Creative Writing Competition (1993). Old Stones is her first book. In 1999-2000, Penne spent several months reading archival material at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library and London’s Public Records Office, and she is now working with that material on a creative non-fiction work about early BC settlers. A collection of her short fiction is being compiled for future publication. Please visit www.aspenne.com.

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