Clara Callan

'A page-turning drama. Clara's story is a profound, graceful, multi-layered slow build of domestic humdrummery that explodes into drama and passion. A sense of the turbulence beneath the surface calm of small lives in small towns underpins this beautiful and subtle book.' Guardian

‘This is a most gorgeously involving novel, moving between dark and light, the head and the heart, and with an ending that pops with surprises.’ Sunday Times

'So successfully captures the female voice, that the correspondences and journal entries read like an addictive crime novel. This is a singularly poignant story about the depravity of human beings as well as their compassion and their amazing capacity to endure.' TLS

A brilliant depiction of a world caught on the brink of change, 'Clara Callan' is a subtle but shocking examination of loneliness, loss of faith and courage against the odds.

It is the late 1930's in Canada, era of the Great Depression. Clara Callan leads a quiet, unremarkable life as a respectable, small-town schoolteacher. Her sister Nora, flightier, prettier, has escaped into the glamour and excitement of New York where she has landed a star role in a radio soap opera.

But Clara's sensible façade belies her passion for love and adventure, and events prove much less predictable than she could ever have imagined. Her dark and fraught journey from innocence to experience, negotiating the pre-Pill, pre-liberation difficulties that then faced all young women, tests her strength and resolve to the limit – and comes to prove that the two sisters have more in common than they thought possible.

Winner of the Giller Prize and the Governor-General's Award for Fiction – Canada's two pre-eminent literary prizes – 'Clara Callan' is a novel of extraordinary power and profundity.