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Burnard, Bonnie A Good House ISBN 13: 9781554685264

A Good House - Softcover

 
9781554685264: A Good House
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Bill Chambers has come home from the second World War with several fingers of his right hand missing but with his will to restore his family life intact. He wants the best for his wife,

Sylvia, and his children, Patrick, Paul and Daphne, and with his steady job at the hardware store, the future stretches out before him. so opens Bonnie Burnard’s brilliant, superbly crafted novel about three generations of an ordinary small-town family from the 1950s to the 1990s. As the family members spread out from their community into the larger world, the bonds deepen, widen and sometimes fray. Loyalties are tested by time and chance, people resort to necessary, self-preserving lies, and love creates its own snares.

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Review:
It's not an easy thing to write a novel about a family. Of necessity--and as the narrative years advance--characters proliferate, success and tragedy accrue, events maneuver to the fore with faintly arbitrary impetus. First-time novelist Bonnie Burnard, however, evades such worn grooves with the purest renunciation: a patient and lovely voice. In A Good House, awarded Canada's Giller Prize in 1999, Burnard documents an Ontario family over half a century with unadorned, deliberate, and tender sympathy.

Flush with post-World War II optimism, veteran Bill Chambers and his wife Sylvia settle in to the business of raising their three young children. Bill logs full days at the local hardware store; Sylvia strings the family's clothes out to dry in the backyard and proffers dinner punctually. Her wasting health, however, leaves her husband yearning for a contentment now stolen and her children disquieted by the sudden tenuousness of their security. When Sylvia dies and Bill remarries, his staunch and pragmatic bride Margaret displays a three-fold capacity: she allows him his sluggish and methodical affection; she preserves Sylvia's memory with untainted regard; and she cultivates a deft empathy with her stepchildren.

Burnard's meticulous pacing nearly, but never quite, upstages the story itself, although her unwieldy and expanding cast of characters occasionally threatens such harm. Margaret is the real wonder of the book. While the requisite affairs, divorces, and funerals intervene--and as Bill declines excruciatingly into a belligerent stranger--she summons a reserve of affection, the source of which is admirably opaque. She perseveres in "hoping as mothers and fathers almost always do that the difficulties could be examined, could be broken apart and fixed one by one by one." Burnard's tale is dignified and generous. --Ben Guterson

About the Author:

BONNIE BURNARD is the author of two novels and two short story collections. Her first story collection, Women of Influence, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. Casino & Other Stories was shortlisted for the inaugural Giller Prize and won the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award. Her first novel, A Good House, won the Giller Prize and the CBA People’s Choice Award and was published around the world in many languages. Her second novel, Suddenly, was a Globe and Mail Book of the Year, praised by critics as “a smart, consuming read” (Toronto Star) and “an unassuming masterpiece” (The Globe and Mail). A recipient of the Marian Engel Award, Bonnie Burnard lives in London, Ontario.

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780312420321: A Good House: A Novel

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780312420321
Publisher: Picador, 2001
Softcover

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    Henry ..., 2000
    Hardcover

  • 9780552999229: A Good House

    Black ..., 2001
    Softcover

  • 9780006393016: A Good House

    Phylli..., 2003
    Softcover

  • 9780385601566: A Good House

    Doubleday, 2000
    Hardcover

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Burnard, Bonnie
Published by Harper Collins (2009)
ISBN 10: 1554685265 ISBN 13: 9781554685264
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