From the author of the best-selling novel Film Society.

Natha is a wife and mother in her mid-thirties living in the town of Stirling, Ontario. She makes her living as a prostitute, a lifestyle that is not only tolerated but encouraged by her semiemployed husband. A series of chance encounters leads her back to her very first client, the town’s elderly bookstore owner. Now dying of cancer, the man offers to pay her thousands of dollars to, among other things, “tell him about love”.

The proposition forces Natha to re-evaluate the choices she has made, why she made them, and how much control she truly has over her own life.

GILAINE MITCHELL lives in Belleville Ontario. She worked in radio and as a scriptwriter, producer and director of corporate and educational video productions for many years before leaving to write her bestselling first novel, Film Society, published in 2000. The Breaking Words is her second published novel.

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“[Mitchell] is a special writer, one whose art of poignancy is super-sized.”

The Sun-Times

“Natha’s realizations are likely familiar to many mid-life readers, who will respond with recognition and understanding to the quiet but profound – and, yes, remarkable – changes that she makes in her ordinary life.”

Buried in Print

“An artful and thoughtful treatment of a woman locked in her life by necessity, with fitting references to Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath littered throughout. The novel smartly suggests that women have long endured and survived their experiences via the act of telling their own stories, and, after living a life of silent and staid complicity, Natha ultimately understands that she must do the same to thrive.”

The Globe and Mail