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The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay: Fiction

ISBN: 9780670021666

Title: The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay: Fiction

Author: Beverly Jensen

KDL Description:

A sequence of tales chronicling the early 20th-century lives of New Brunswick sisters Idella and Avis Hillock includes “Gone,” an account of their mother’s heartbreaking childbirth crisis and the Pushcart Prize-nominated “Wake,” in which they attend their wild father’s funeral.

Amazon Description: A tale of two sisters over seventy years that recovers the vibrant and unforgettable voice of Beverly Jensen

In 1916, Idella and Avis Hillock live on the edge of a chilly bluff in New Brunswick-a hardscrabble world of potato farms and lobster traps, rough men, hard work, and baffling beauty. From “Gone,” the heartbreaking story of their mother’s medical crisis in childbirth, to the darkly comic “Wake,” which follows the grown siblings’ catastrophic efforts to escort their father, “Wild Bill” Hillock’s body to his funeral, the stories of Idella and Avis offer a compelling and wry vision of two remarkable women. The vivid cast includes Idella’s philandering husband Edward, her bewilderingly difficult mother-in-law- and Avis, whose serial romantic disasters never quell her irrepressible spirit. Jensen’s work evokes a time gone by and reads like an instant American classic.

Beverly Jensen died of cancer at the age of forty-nine without publishing her work. Since her death, her fiction has been championed by a dedicated group of supporters, including Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates.