<b>Her family broken apart and her identity taken away, she had to forget her past in order to face her future. But forgetting isn't forever.</b> <br /> <br /> Taken from their mother's care and deported from England to the colonies, ten-year-old Marjorie Arnison and her nine-year-old brother, Kenny, were sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island in September 1937. Their eight-year-old sister, Audrey, followed the next August. <br /> <br /> Marjorie's new home was on an isolated farm -- a cottage she shared with at least ten other girls and a "cottage mother" at the head, who had complete control over her "children." <br /> <br /> Survival required sticking to bare essentials. Marjorie had to accept a loss, which was difficult to forgive. Turning inward, she would find strength to pull her through, but she had to lock away her memories in order to endure her new life. <br /> <br /> Marjorie was well into her senior years before those memories resurfaced.
Weaving finely spun filaments of the lyric and mythic, Barbara Lambert creates a vivid tapestry of a year in the life of Vancouver s Allegra Schliemann, a middle-aged woman in the throes of a knotty love affair with a married man, a newly-crafted career as an artisan and a battle against a debilitating disease. Unable to see her way clear of the emotional clutter these changes wreak, Allegra hires would-be artist Brad Lindhall to fashion her a mirrored wall, praying it will bring light and clarity into the encroaching dusk of her own life. Meanwhile, in Toronto, Brad s estranged wife Mona researches a work known as A Brief History of Cloth and Clay for an upcoming installation, her voice reaching into the past and across the country. In this brilliant recasting of a traditional love triangle, three artists find their way into the heart of genius, and of darkness, emerging strangely and irrevocably intertwined. Like her many mythological predecessors Philomela, Ariadne and Athena Allegra encircles lovers, entraps enemies and unfurls in the face of adversity."