Joan Barfoot's Books

Luck

By: Joan Barfoot

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“There is good luck, and there is bad luck, and then there’s the ambiguous sort of luck that’s a lot of this and some of the other.” Philip Lawrence, a robust and pleasure-loving furniture-maker, dies suddenly at the age of forty-six. Though that’s terribly young by most standards, he’s lucky to have passed presumably peacefully in his sleep. Less fortunate, however, are the three women he leaves behind to make sense of his loss. There’s Nora, his wife of seventeen years, who wakes up next to his dead body. A fiery visual artist, Nora’s feminist re-interpretation of biblical themes stoked fundamentalist outrage from her small-town neighbours. Now, as her emotions run the gamut, she must confront solo life in a place she despises. Nora shares the house with Sophie, a buxom and bossy redhead, who works as the couple’s housekeeper and personal assistant. A recovering virtue addict, Sophie turns to menial tasks as a way to suppress painful memories of her two-year stint as an overseas aid worker. Philip’s death leaves her quietly reeling. And then there’s the pliable and vacuous Beth, a former beauty queen, who serves as Nora’s live-in muse and model. She mourns not Philip so much as the loss of a haven from her own creepy past. The novel follows the three days immediately after Philip’s death. Privately, each woman deals with memories and emotions, secrets and uncomfortable revelations, while at the same time preparing for the public rituals of mourning (including a funeral like no other). The narrative moves seamlessly from one perspective to another with delicious dark humour and wry insight into the nature of death, love, mourning, fundamentalism and luck. Barfoot’s tenth novel, Luck was shortlisted for the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The jury citation reads as follows: “Joan Barfoot is at the peak of her powers with this splendidly realized tragicomedy about a household in the wake of an unexpected death. With its note-perfect narration, mordant wit and wonderfully neurotic cast of characters, Luck shows how death can reveal life in all its absurdity and complexity. This scintillating comedy of manners is also a profound meditation on fate, love, and artifice.”

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Page Count

318

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307375315

ISBN 13

9780307375315

Dancing in the Dark

By: Joan Barfoot

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Dancing in the Dark

By: Joan Barfoot

Edna Cormick, forty-three, is incarcerated in a mental hospital for murdering her husband. For twenty years, Edna escaped the world by devoting herself to the health and welfare of her husband and home, so when she learns he’s been having an affair, her sense of betrayal is devastating and literally maddening. And so she sits, silently filling notebooks, trying to find where and how her life went wrong. Dancing in the Dark is a tightly woven psychological novel, which explores the idea that madness is not necessarily self-destructive, and may lead to a kind of wisdom.

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Page Count

226

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307368424

ISBN 13

9780307368423

Family News

By: Joan Barfoot

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Family News

By: Joan Barfoot

* Susannah, estranged from her family for 14 years because of her illegitimate daughter, returns home when her father dies. Susannah's daughter, Lizzie, who travels with her also must confront her mother's past. Strong language.

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Page Count

267

Published Date

ISBN 10

0771599382

ISBN 13

9780771599385

Exit Lines

By: Joan Barfoot

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Exit Lines

By: Joan Barfoot

The Idyll Inn, the setting for Joan Barfoot’s brilliant eleventh novel, Exit Lines, is a pastel-hued care facility designed for seniors “with healthy incomes but varying hopes, despairs, abilities and deformities.” In scathing detail, Barfoot describes the Idyll Inn’s plastic plants, inoffensive art and pallid recreational activities, all familiar to any reader who has had occasion to visit such a place — or to live in one. Running the show (or so she thinks) is priggish administrator Annabelle Walker, charged with keeping the residents happy, or at least as happy as is required to keep a tidy profit flowing to far-away investors. But not all residents of the Idyll Inn choose to acquiesce. Sylvia Lodge, one of the Idyll Inn’s first residents, prides herself on her steely backbone, despite crippling arthritis. Affluently widowed, she has selected the Idyll Inn as a less objectionable alternative to a perilous dwindling at home. She coolly refuses to be bossed, certainly not by Annabelle Walker (about whose family Sylvia keeps a dark secret), or by her estranged daughter, Nancy, from whom she keeps yet another, even more explosive, secret. Sylvia is determined to unapologetically lay claim to her lifetime of choices, responsibilities and blame, not yet aware that her icy solitude will shortly be broken by the company of three soon-to-be-intimate friends. Given the facility’s small population, the Idyll Inn’s new inhabitants are bound to have crossed paths. And indeed many have. Wheelchair-confined George Hammond, once a handsome shoe store—owner with a stay-at-home wife and adored daughter, long ago cupped Sylvia’s feet in his hands and admired her well-formed calves. He has done far more with Greta Bauer, his former clerk, whose loneliness as a young immigrant widow with children rendered her available for a comfortable and seemingly uncomplicated affair. Now deposited under the same roof by absent children, the former lovers are in a position to reflect on the consequences of their choices. Completing the newly formed coterie of friends is tiny Ruth Friedman, a retired Children’s Aid worker who keeps many of the city’s darkest secrets, and whose passionate late-in-life marriage to fellow social worker Bernard did not include children of their own. Now also widowed, her grief unfathomably deep, she has taken to cheerfully reading horrifying news stories aloud to her new friends, who are soon to discover that these daily doses of gloom are less for their edification than they are in service of a desperate project for which Ruth needs their complicity. In the wryly funny and wholly compassionate Exit Lines, acclaimed author Joan Barfoot once again treats her readers to an intimate encounter with some fascinating characters engaged in the fight of their lives. Sylvia, George, Greta and Ruth are at times tender, angry, hilarious and deeply flawed, but always utterly and captivatingly human. How do we treat the elderly in our lives? How do we intend to grow old ourselves? Will we ever come to the end of longing? Exit Lines brings to the surface these and other fundamental questions about the nature of life, and its closing.

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Page Count

338

Publisher

Knopf Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307371727

ISBN 13

9780307371720

Luck

By: Joan Barfoot

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Luck

By: Joan Barfoot

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318

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Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307375315

ISBN 13

9780307375315

Dancing in the Dark

By: Joan Barfoot

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Dancing in the Dark

By: Joan Barfoot

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Page Count

226

Publisher

Vintage Canada

Published Date

ISBN 10

0307368424

ISBN 13

9780307368423

Critical Injuries

By: Joan Barfoot

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Critical Injuries

By: Joan Barfoot

After years of trauma and disappointment, 49-year-old Isla is finally content in her second marriage to Lyle. 17-year-old Roddy is a faltering student and occasional shoplifter simply trying to make sense of his past. Their worlds collide one hot August afternoon when a fake robbery goes wrong.

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Page Count

335

Published Date

ISBN 10

0704347520

ISBN 13

9780704347526

Some Things about Flying

By: Joan Barfoot

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Some Things about Flying

By: Joan Barfoot

From the author of GAINING GROUND, a novel about fidelity. A married man and his mistress decide to take a long discussed holiday together, but on their flight out their aeroplane catches fire, a potential calamity which prompts the woman to view her paramour in an entirely new, and quite unflattering, light.

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Page Count

208

Publisher

London : Women's Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0704345498

ISBN 13

9780704345492

Social & Emotional Development

Connecting Science and Practice in Early Childhood Settings

By: Dave Riley,Robert San Juan,Joan Klinkner,Ann Ramminger

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Social & Emotional Development

Connecting Science and Practice in Early Childhood Settings

By: Dave Riley,Robert San Juan,Joan Klinkner,Ann Ramminger

Find out what the research says about common early childhood program practices, such as playing "Simon Says" or holding children while feeding them—time-tested activities you intuitively know help young children. Social and Emotional Development explores the effectiveness of these early learning tools and helps answer the question, "Why do we do what we do?" Children in child care centers often spend large chunks of time on activities without an obvious academic component, such as learning to dance to different tempos. Research shows, however, that these activities promote children’s social and emotional development. This practical and accessible book explains the research behind many common, wise early childhood practices, as well as the shortcomings of others. Key topics include: How to help children form a strong attachment with an adult and foster a feeling of security. The importance of peer relationships and how to help children learn to take turns, develop empathy, and not act selfishly. Three forms of self-regulation: controlling impulsive behavior, developing problem-solving ability, and learning to regulate emotions.

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Page Count

166

Publisher

Redleaf Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1605543411

ISBN 13

9781605543413

Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913

By: Joan Passey

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Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913

By: Joan Passey

This book asks why so many authors drew on Cornwall for inspiration across the long nineteenth century, and considers the seismic cultural changes in Cornwall that spurred this interest – from the collapse of the mining industry to the developing national rail network; from the birth of tourism to the neomedieval rise in interest in King Arthur. Understanding frequently overlooked Cornwall in this period is vital to understanding Gothic literature, the Victorian imagination, intellectual and creative networks, and attitudes towards regionality. The first part of the book considers landscape and legend, defining a mining Gothic tradition, exposing the shipwreck as Gothic mastertrope, and demonstrating how antiquarians drew from Cornish legends and lore. The second part explores encounters with modernity, investigating the impact of railway expansion on access to Cornwall, the development of a Cornish King Arthur as a key figure of Victorian masculinity, and the specific features of the Cornish ghost story.

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Page Count

289

Publisher

University of Wales Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1786839938

ISBN 13

9781786839930

We Remember the Battle of Britain

By: Frank Shaw,Joan Shaw

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We Remember the Battle of Britain

By: Frank Shaw,Joan Shaw

‘I was talking and laughing with a school friend in the street when suddenly there was the eerie wailing notes of the air raid siren filling the air. I can remember that our laughter stopped straight away, and I recall feeling chilled and scared. Doors were opened and people came out of their houses looking up to the sky ... It was a Sunday morning on a beautiful summer’s day with blue skies and really warm sunshine. But within minutes our lives had changed, and the child in me had gone, never to return.’ Mrs Mary Earle, Kent After the surrender of France to Germany Churchill announced that ‘the Battle of Britain is about to begin’ and on 10 July 1940 the Luftwaffe began bombing ships in the English Channel in readiness for a full air assault on the south of England. In August, German aircraft were attacking coastal airfields, moving inland to attack radar bases, further RAF airfields and aircraft factories, until finally turning their attention to London and other major cities. But Hitler had underestimated the determination of the RAF and by mid-September the Luftwaffe sustained such great losses that Britain had won the battle for our skies and the German invasion was called off. This third instalment in the ‘We Remember’ series is filled with stories from servicemen from the air and on the ground, and the men, women and children who witnessed the extraordinary fights between British and German planes.

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Page Count

388

Publisher

Random House

Published Date

ISBN 10

1448177316

ISBN 13

9781448177318

Dancing at Lughnasa

By: Joan Fitzpatrick Dean

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Dancing at Lughnasa

By: Joan Fitzpatrick Dean

* Lucid and accessible style makes the series appealing to the general reader * Liberally illustrated throughout with stills from the film under discussion. * Collaboration between Cork University Press and the Film Institute of Ireland. Between the premiere of Brian Friel's stage play "Dancing at Lughnasa" in 1990 and Pat O'Connor's cinematic adaptation in 1998, Ireland experienced seismic economic and social changes, as well as "Riverdance", "Angela's Ashes" and an international vogue for all things Irish. Set in 1936, "Dancing at Lughnasa", as both film and play, imagines an anachronistic past in which the loss of joyous communal ritual is symptomatic of the cultural malaise so often associated with Ireland in the 1930s. Drawing upon unpublished material from the Friel archive at the National Library of Ireland, Joan FitzPatrick Dean contrasts the expressly theatrical elements of Friel's play and their cinematic counterparts

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Page Count

124

Publisher

Cork University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1859183611

ISBN 13

9781859183618

Ferries of the Upper Thames

By: Joan Tucker

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Ferries of the Upper Thames

By: Joan Tucker

Joan Tucker presents a profusely illustrated history of the Thames ferries.

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Page Count

439

Publisher

Amberley Publishing Limited

Published Date

ISBN 10

1445620073

ISBN 13

9781445620077

Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch

A Novel

By: Joan Barfoot

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Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch

A Novel

By: Joan Barfoot

Charlotte and Claudia are lifelong friends now approaching their seventieth birthdays. The plots of their lives are different, yet both have secrets they can reveal only to each other. In this profoundly moving novel, two intelligent women explore their lives and loves with audacity, frankness and insight.

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Page Count

260

Published Date

ISBN 10

1550135570

ISBN 13

9781550135572

Luck

A Novel

By: Perseus

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Luck

A Novel

By: Perseus

Abruptly widowed when her husband unexpectedly passes away in his sleep, Nora, an artist whose bible-story artworks have sparked local fundamentalist furor, struggles through her first three days in her hated home town, while her housekeeper, Sophie, quietly hides the grief of a secret past. Original.

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Page Count

307

Publisher

Carroll & Graf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0786716460

ISBN 13

9780786716463

Book's by Joan Barfoot

Luck

Luck

Dancing in the Dark

Dancing in the Dark

Family News

Family News

Exit Lines

Exit Lines

Luck

Luck

Dancing in the Dark

Dancing in the Dark

Critical Injuries

Critical Injuries

Some Things about Flying

Some Things about Flying

Social & Emotional Development

Social & Emotional Development

Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913

Cornish Gothic, 1830-1913

We Remember the Battle of Britain

We Remember the Battle of Britain

Dancing at Lughnasa

Dancing at Lughnasa

Ferries of the Upper Thames

Ferries of the Upper Thames

Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch

Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch

Luck

Luck

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