Alone in the Classroom
ISBN: 978-0-7710-3794-8
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Publishing date: April 26th, 2011
UK edition available from MacLehose Press
Elizabeth Hay’s most intricate, compelling, and seductive novel yet.
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National #1 Bestseller / The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Maclean’s
A Globe and Mail Top Book of 2011
Amazon.ca Best Book of 2011
About the Book
In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a backward student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behaviour culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day.
Connie’s niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie’s past and her mother’s broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls. As the novel moves deeper into their lives, the triangle of principal, teacher, student opens out into other emotional triangles – aunt, niece, lover; mother, daughter, granddaughter – until a sudden, capsizing love thrusts Anne herself into a newly independent life.
This spellbinding tale – set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley – crosses generations and cuts to the bone. It probes the roots of obsessive love and hate, how the hurts and desires of childhood persist and are passed on, as if in the blood. It lays bare the urgency of discovering what we were never told about the past. And it celebrates the process of becoming who we are in a world full of startling connections that lie just out of sight.
Reviews
Reading for the Joy of It review of Alone in the Classroom
Janet Somerville, the blogger behind Reading for the Joy of It, provided this early assessment of Alone in the Classroom: "a sublime little shock to the heart." The full review is available on her blog.