Description:

These twenty superbly crafted linked stories navigate the difficult realm of friendship, charting its beginnings and ends, its intimacies and betrayals, its joys and humiliations. A mother learns something of the nature of love from watching her young daughter as she falls in and out of favour with a neighbourhood girl. An intricate story of two women reveals a friendship held together by the steely bonds of passivity. A chance sighting in a library prompts a woman to recall the “unconsummated courtship” she was drawn into by a male colleague. With trenchant insight, uncommon honesty, and dark humour, Elizabeth Hay probes the precarious bonds that exist between friends. The result is an emotionally raw and provocative collection of stories that will resonate with readers long after the final page. *From the Trade Paperback edition.* ### From Library Journal Hay's (A Student of Weather) second book of short stories examines the changing seasons of friendship, its peaks and valleys, joys and betrayals. In many of these tales, she illustrates how the course of friendship at first runs smoothly but invariably transforms itself over time, sometimes even burning itself out. The characters in these interconnected stories come alive and earn readers' sympathy and understanding. Maureen in The Fire or Ivy in The Parents could well be one's neighbor, sister, or grandmother. In spare prose, the stories exert a quiet forcefulness and convey a sense of character, message, and plot without pretense or superficiality. A gifted storyteller, Hay has written a wise, penetrating, and memorable collection of stories that communicates the vulnerable nature of friendship. First published in Canada by Porcupine's Quill in 1997, this collection was a finalist for three literary prizes, including the Trillium Award. Very highly recommended for academic and public libraries.Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Sys., Harrisburg, PA Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. ### From Booklist This exceptional, well-paced collection of linked stories about women's friendships has an extraordinarily intimate feel that's propelled by the reader's sense that he or she has either known or been the woman Hay portrays, the character Beth, who is the connecting thread. She and the author Elizabeth are most often one, but occasionally their voices separate into two, weaving an extra glint of color in the fabric of the stories. Beth, also a writer, is self-conscious and analytical. She focuses her examining eye on her friendships--the joys and wounds, offerings and rejections, beginnings and endings--to find further clues to her own self. And these friends of hers are an interesting and diverse group. In "Hand Games" she sees the woes of friendship through her daughter's eyes; in "Sayonara" the friend is a man with indefinable motives; in "The Reader" it is a sentimental woman with a core of steel. Canadian writer Hay, author of the splendid novel *A Student of Weather* [BKL N 15 00], evokes timelessness and universality. *Danise Hoover* *Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved*