Luck

NOMINATED FOR THE 2005 GILLER PRIZE

"Luck took me right out of myself—I read it in one gulp, and it never let me down. Sharp and surprising.” —Alice Munro

From the author of Gaining Ground, a darkly funny tale of three ostracized women bound together by a sudden and uneventful death.

One night, Philip Lawrence—forty-six, loud, and boisterous—dies in his sleep. It’s a dull evening otherwise.

Nora wakes up next to her husband’s dead body. Her first thought: How will the town think Philip died? A fiery visual artist, Nora’s feminist re-imaginings of biblical scenes have stoked fundamentalist outrage from her small-town neighbours. Now she must confront the place she despises without her husband as her ally, left only with two unlikely companions at home.

There’s the housekeeper, Sophie, a recovering virtue addict who is privately reeling from a traumatic two-year stint as an overseas aid worker—and from Philip’s death. Meanwhile, Beth, Nora’s live-in muse, spirals deeper into obsession about her past as it threatens to reveal that she isn’t as simple as she seems.

In the three transformative days that follow Philip’s death, the women prepare for a funeral like no other, even as they each contend with the memories, emotions and secrets that privately besiege them and, despite all odds, draw them closer together. With laser precision and note-perfect narration, Luck showcases Joan Barfoot’s breathtaking powers as a chronicler of women’s interiority and a writer of the highest emotional acuity.