Clara Callan

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

Set in a small Ontario town in the 1930s and in New York City, Clara
Callan depicts the lives of two young women through the regular exchange
of their letters. Clara, a schoolteacher in her 30s, lives in Uxbridge.
Her headstrong younger sister Nora has chosen the world of radio in New
York. Nora succeeds in landing a starring role in a radio soap, while
the quieter Clara longs for the love and adventure her sister seems to
have found.

The sisters share their experiences, their hopes and dreams, against a
background of a world wrestling with economic depression and gathering
war-clouds in Europe. The novel’s length makes possible the slow and
steady development of feelings, hopes, and fears. The texture is dense
and skilful. It is a novel to be savored unhurriedly, in the same spirit
in which the twinned stories have been imagined and written.

Richard Wright has won numerous literary awards and nominations for
awards. He is the author of seven earlier novels and one children’s
book. Clara Callan is fiction in the tradition of the great 19th-century
British novels that bring their worlds to life and allow the reader to
share them.