In the Field
Biblioasis, 2011
Ellie Lucan’s about as far as she can get from the teenager she used to be. She’s got a doctorate in soil science, her husband’s a prominent academic, and their children are excelling at the local Montessori school.
When she loses her teaching job, however, she packs up her two sons to spend the summer in her hometown with her mother. She finds her mother suffering from dementia and the house in squalor, and she is forced to confront small town prejudice towards her biracial sons.
As Ellie is drawn back into the community and finds herself at the mercy of an old lover, she’s forced to decide where her loyalties lie.
“We were much engaged with this unsentimental portrait of a disintegrating marriage whose characters absorbed us. We were also drawn to the dailyness of the Nova Scotia life the novel depicts. If ‘Canadian’ means much in our fiction, this book embodies it.”
— John Metcalf and Leon Rooke