65.000 words / Manuscript now available
RIGHTS SOLDCanada: Goose Lane Editions, Mar 2011
ABOUT VALERIE COMPTON
(Photo: Anna-Lisa Jones)
VALERIE COMPTON has been writing for almost twenty years. Her short fiction has been published in such journals as The Malahat Review and The New Quarterly and has garnered numerous grants and awards. An early chapter from her novel The Tide Road was short-listed for the CBC Literary Awards.
a novel by Valerie Compton
VISION AND MEMORY TELL LIES IN A STUNNING DEBUT NOVEL
“Wise and wonderfully expressed … a brilliant debut novel.” — TELEGRAPH-JOURNAL, SAINT JOHN
“Compton’s intimate familial work is a beauty to behold.” — THE WINNIPEG REVIEW
“Written in eloquent, limpid prose, Compton's novel is irresistibly filmic.” — THE CHRONICLE HERALD
“In this beautiful, fierce, richly imagined novel, Valerie Compton evokes the closed world of Prince Edward Island and the schisms of a family grappling with the mysterious disappearance of their oldest daughter. Like the ice that may or may not have claimed Stella, this novel glitters and spins and took me to wholly unexpected places. Compton has a great gift for hiding secrets in plain sight and for capturing the cost of secrecy. A wonderful debut.” — MARGOT LIVESEY, author of The House on Fortune Street
“Valerie Compton is the antidote to wilful amnesia, an astonishingly assured new voice delivering the truth with a kind of fierce economy. Read her and remember.” — RICHARD CUMYN, author of The View from Tamischeira
When Stella disappears, leaving her toddler and husband behind, her mother Sonia, a widowed farm wife and former lighthouse keeper, struggles to face the possibility that her daughter may not have slipped through the ice.
Struggling with the thought of her daughter’s gruesome death, and longing for a life she herself never had, Sonia becomes the unreliable narrator you want to be deceived by.
Inconsistent memories weave through the novel; some may even be true. None give Sonia relief from her agony. She’s carried the burden of a bad decision all her life, and now the guilt she feels at her daughter’s disappearance – or murder, or accident – is too much to handle. Sonia retreats into her mind where she must come to terms with both her present and her past.