Mayhem, murder and mothers. Uncover Claudia’s secrets and her story from Sweden to Spain to Canada. Are the stormy events in her life somehow connected or are they merely coincidence?
Born in Sweden, to a Latvian mother and an absent father, Claudia Hewitt embraces her careful middle-class Canadian life. But then she witnesses the aftermath of a murder from the window of her Regina home. Recalling other murders she’s experienced, growing up in Sweden, and later holidaying in Spain, she begins to wonder if death is stalking her.
Her mother’s difficult past in pre-WWII Latvia, and equally-horrific contemporary events from that part of the world, also trouble Claudia deeply. In response, she seeks emotional reconnection with her mother, and with her own children. Some, but not all, secrets from the past are shared. Is it enough to heal these women? Their families?
Claudia is full of fine writing, lovely natural imagery and sharp insights, rendered in the author’s cool but evocative prose. Intense, but with cathartic flashes of humour, the novel meditates on the presence of violence in the world, and the complex, sometimes difficult, potentially nourishing, relationships between mothers and daughters. Claudia will live with readers long after the last page is turned.
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