MISS ELVA

Random, Toronto, 2005, 1^st/1^st.  ISBN 0-679-31339-7.  Hard cover, 243 pages.  Unread copy; jacket has very light edge and cover wear, price intact; book is tightly bound with head and tail bands, spine ends lightly bumped.  Interior clean and unmarked; deckled fore-edge.  ‘1970.  A tiny fisherman’s shack on the dark Nova Scotia coast, eccentrically covered with folk art images, which are all the work of a benign, disfigured mute whom the locals dismiss as a misshapen nothing.  Miss Elva.  Only one man knows that the whimsical, primitive art old Elva painfully creates is her voice, damning the madness of love and lamenting decades of lies.  He is also the only person still alive who remembers Elva as she was in the summer of 1927, a crippled little thing in the shadow of her beautiful half-sister Jane.  That peculiar summer of snow and rum-runners when the black sheep Gil returned to a troubled town for his father’s funeral, dogged by sin and retribution and his mysterious friend, Oak – only to find that his twin brother, Dom, had become Jane’s lover.  The unhappy reunion breeds rivalry and self-loathing, complicated by racial violence and religious intolerance. And Elva, missing nothing and hoping to free those she loves from pain, unwittingly unleashes the fire that destroys them all.‘ (from front flap)