The thirteen linked stories in Joan Clark's Swimming Toward the Light are like a spectrum of bright colours refracted into a clear white beam. Layer by layer, they reveal the life of Madge Murray, from her childhood in wartime Nova Scotia and her youth in New Brunswick, to her defiance as a young divorcee and her continuing quest as a West Coast artist.

Always, Madge struggles to live in peace, dependent by instinct but pulled towards independence by her circumstances and the discovery of her own creativity. Decent, fallible, and startlingly complex, Madge's family, from her distant ancestors to her grown children, shares her own tangled nature.

In Swimming Toward the Light, Clark portrays a determined girl growing into a strong woman who faces violence and misery head-on. Some stories, such as "Luna Moths," contain passages of lyrical beauty, and others, including "War Stories" and "The Train Family," are rich with the poignancy that comes with delayed understanding.

Joan Clark is one of Canada's most distinguished writers. She was born in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, grew up in Sydney Mines and in Sussex, New Brunswick, and lived for twenty years in Alberta. There, she began her literary career as a children's author and, with Edna Alford, founded Dandelion, Alberta's first literary magazine. Since the mid-1980s, she has made her home in St. John's, Newfoundland. In 1991, Clark received the prestigious Marian Engel Award. In addition to Swimming Toward the Light, she is the author of three novels. The first, The Victory of Geraldine Gull, won the Canadian Authors' Association Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the Governor General's Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award. Eriksdotter was a fictional account of the voyage to Finland led by Freydis, daughter of Erik the Red. Her most recent novel, Latitudes of Melt, is a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Caribbean and Canada region, and is a recent nominee for the international IMPAC Award.

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