Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore

Caroline Mack is a librarian in Beckenham, Kent, England.

Ann Copeland’s fifth work of fiction follows her previous book, The
Golden Thread, in telling the story of Claire Delaney. Like Copeland
herself, Claire was once a nun but gave up the convent to return to the
secular world, marriage, and children. The stories are for the most part
told in Claire’s own voice and blend her memories of her convent
experiences with her present-day life as the middle-aged mother of
teenage children.

“The pleasure of the middle years,” Claire observes, is “looking
both ways.” Copeland skilfully evokes the joys and pains of both youth
and middle age in her depictions of Claire’s relationships with her
teenage son and elderly mother. Above all, one senses the value the
author attaches to memory. Some of the book’s most effective moments
occur when Claire returns to her past in the convent. In the modern
world, it may be difficult to understand why anyone would want to become
a nun; but Copeland demonstrates with great clarity the joys and
achievements of the spiritual life, in particular in “Another
Christmas,” which stands out for its description of the warmth and
purity of a festival celebrated for spiritual rather than material
reasons. Copeland also questions aspects of the nun’s life (the story
of Claire’s colleague Sister Dolores, who suffers a nervous breakdown
while in the convent, is particularly harrowing), but ultimately there
is little sense that she views the years in the convent as wasted.

This beautifully crafted collection of stories successfully blends the
spiritual and the practical in its sympathetic portrayal of a woman who
sees life from an unusual and illuminating perspective.