The dilemma is echoed or reinforced by a muted tension between the scientific bent of the Vereys and the 'arty' predilections of the Menges family, the fractured, extended clan at the heart of the book; and by the 'subtle fight of the female with the male... of female blithe confidence against male doubt'.

Crow Lake by Mary Lawson - January Magazine Reviews | Crow Lake by Mary Lawson - January Magazine

Growing up + survival. In both cases, it is a novel of growing up, closely related to the experience of survival and preservation of integrity in extremely unfavorable external circumstances.The Other Side of the Bridge was deservedly longlisted for the Man Booker prize. It is Mary Lawson's second novel: her first, Crow Lake, was memorable for its spare, effective style and its powerful storytelling. This new book revisits the same territory in northern Ontario - the lake features, and the town doctor becomes a central figure - and is, if anything, even more arresting. She has a remarkable gift for conjuring up place and people in a handful of words, a few lines of dialogue. Struan is a remote town set amid wilderness and farming land, with a sawmill, "a sorry bunch of stores lined up along a dusty main street", the Hudson's Bay Company, Post Office, bank, restaurant, bar, hotel. The population is involved in farming or employed at the sawmill and the local mine. There is also the Ojibway reserve, with its own self-contained community. Kate attended a conference in Edmonton to give a paper on the effect of pesticides on the life of still-water ponds.

BBC Radio 4 - Bookclub, Mary Lawson: Crow Lake

Thanks to Goodreaders Esil and Zoeytron for recommending Crow Lake in their comments about my review of Road Ends. I've found a new favorite writer.Update after reading it a second time: even more moved the second time. This book grows with the reader. I have pursued your dream single-mindedly; I have become familiar with books and ideas you never even imagined, and somehow, in the process of acquiring all that knowledge, I have managed to learn nothing at all." There is something about water, even if you have no particular interest in the life-forms within it”. She also has a glamorous best friend who has a sexy boyfriend who, it turns out, through an ingeniously arranged sequence of inadvertently divulged information and a recovered earring, Clare once slept with and forgot. The man did not forget.