Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore

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Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore

In this sequel to The Golden Thread, Claire Delaney recalls her past and steers a tricky path among mid-life joys and responsibilities.

AUTHOR

Ann Copeland

Ann Copeland, a native of Connecticut, lived in Sackville, New Brunswick, for twenty-five years before moving to Salem, Oregon, in 1996. A popular fiction writing instructor at workshops in Canada, the US, and New Zealand, she is the author of The ABCs of Writing Fiction and six books of stories. The Golden Thread, linked stories about Sister Claire Delaney, was a finalist for a 1990 Governor General’s Award; “Another Christmas,” first published in the Fiddlehead, is part of Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore, the sequel to The Golden Thread.

Reviews

In The Golden Thread, Ann Copeland’s last book of stories, Claire Delaney emerged from her convent after eleven years as a nun. That book won Copeland a place as a finalist for the 1990 Governor General’s Award for fiction.

Now, in the linked stories in Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore, Copeland takes Claire into the complicated territory of middle age. As her oldest son starts college, Claire revisits her young self, when she followed the call to religious life and later the mature knowledge that she must leave it.

Moving between the present and the past, Claire steers a tricky path among midlife joys and responsibilities, from the grace of “Another Christmas,” to the physical intensity of “Leaving the World,” to the angry, provisional resolution of “Rupture.”