Leaning, Leaning Over Water

Recreates in luminous, compelling prose the lives of a family in the village of St. Pierre on the banks of the Ottawa River. It is the post-war period, and Jock moves his anglo-Irish family to Quebec, where he lives with his wife, Maura, and their three children in a small bungalow, complains about the Duplessis government, and tries to teach his children about life and poetry. But beneath the unrippled domestic surface bubble the anxieties and hopes of the women in the family. Grounded in the texture of everyday life in the 1950s and echoing the moods of the river itself, Leaning, Leaning Over the Water captures with exquisite sensitivity and wisdom the nuances of a young girl's growth toward adulthood.