May Read - Cavan Reading Group

This month, the group will be reading Mary Lawson's Body of Work.

Click on the Book Covers to reserve a copy on our Library Catalogue

About Mary Lawson:

Mary Lawson is a Canadian novelist who hailed from Blackwell, Ontario and is a distant relative of L. M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. She moved to England after graduating from McGill University with a degree in psychology in 1968 and now lives in Kingston-Upon-Thames, Surrey. She is married and has two grown up sons. Her three novels to date - Crowe Lake, The Other Side of the Bridge and Roads End - were all set in Northern Ontario. 

Crowe Lake - A tale of love, death and redemption set in the eponymous Crow Lake, an isolated rural community where time has stood still. Narrated by 26-year-old Kate Morrison, we dive in and out of the troubled woman's childhood memories over the passage of a year--when she was seven and her parents were killed in a motoring accident, leaving Kate, her younger sister Bo and two older brothers Matt and Luke orphaned. The proverbial can of worms is opened for our heroine when she receives an invitation to Matt's son's 18th birthday. The successful zoologist and professor, so accustomed to dissecting everything through a microscope, must suddenly analyse her own relationship and come to terms with her past before she forsakes a future with the man she loves.

The Other Side of the Bridge - A novel of jealousy, rivalry and the dangerous power of obsession. Two brothers, Arthur and Jake Dunn, are the sons of a farmer in the mid-1930s, when life is tough and another world war is looming. Arthur is reticent, solid, dutiful and set to inherit the farm and his father’s character; Jake is younger, attractive, mercurial and dangerous to know – the family misfit. When a beautiful young woman comes into the community, the fragile balance of sibling rivalry tips over the edge.

Roads End brings us a family unravelling in the aftermath of tragedy: Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, twenty-five years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years held the family together but has finally broken free and gone to England, to try to make a life of her own.