Duet for Three - Softcover

Joan Barfoot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140093877 ISBN 13: 9780140093872

Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper), 1987

Synopsis

Aggie, June, and Frances--grandmother, mother, and granddaughter--gain a shared understanding, through private memories and personal experiences, of the forces that bind their lives together

About this title

About the Author

Joan Barfoot is an award-winning novelist whose work has been compared internationally with that of Anne Tyler, Carol Shields, Margaret Drabble and Margaret Atwood. Her novels include Luck in 2005, nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, as well as Abra, which won the Books in Canada first novels award, Dancing in the Dark, which became an award-winning Canadian entry in the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, Duet for Three, Family News, Plain Jane, Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch, Some Things About Flying, and Getting Over Edgar. Her 2001 novel, Critical Injuries, was longlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2001 Trillium Book Award. In 1992 she was given the Marian Engel Award. Also a journalist during much of her career, she lives in London, Ontario, Canada.

From Publishers Weekly

Decades of living in each other's pockets have only magnified fundamental differences between Aggie, sly and massively stout at 80, and her dour, God-fearing daughter June. Their uneasy truce is shattered by the breakdown of Aggie's health, whereupon June announces with grim satisfaction that she can no longer cope alone. Aggie, who delightedly torments her daughter with gusts of salty, piercing humor, is caught completely off balance by the threat of a nursing home. Alternating between the voices of these two women, Barfoot (Dancing in the Dark skillfully distills a lifetime of sweet and sour memories, beginning as Aggie enters into an unsatisfying marriage with a pale, cold Englishman who gives her little but the daughter who so closely resembles him. When June's marriage ends, she returns to the now-widowed Aggie with her daughter, Frances, a child as daring and strong-willed as June had been meek. It is to Frances that the women ultimately look to solve their painful impasse. Occasional slow patches hardly mar this poignant and gratifying tale of the ties that bind a family.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper)
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140093877
• ISBN 13: 9780140093872
• Binding: Paperback