Critical Injuries

From the author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Luck comes the Man Booker Prize nominated Critical Injuries. Isla and her second husband Lyle are heading out in Lyle’s truck for a celebratory ice cream treat. Teenaged Roddy is finally carrying out a plan he sees leading to a new, more hopeful life away from his hometown. They’ve never met. After a catastrophic first marriage, Isla is recovering in a contented and sheltered connection with Lyle. At 17, Roddy is flailing, desperate for escape into a shiny future he hasn’t precisely envisioned. Then in one unpredictable, unintended moment, Isla’s and Roddy’s lives intersect in an ice cream shop, and nothing can be the same for either of them again. Selected by The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star as one of the best books of the year. Longlisted for the 2002 Man Booker Prize. Shortlisted for the 2001 Trillium Book Award. Review Excerpts: Carol Shields: "I have no doubt but that this wise, funny, harrowing novel will be the book of the year. The writing is superbly in charge of itself. The subject of Critical Injuries is forgiveness, and at its moral centre is an intelligent, reflective consciousness we can admire, but also love." The Times of London: "Barfoot is a novelist who should be known to all aficionados of black comedies about the trials of love and marriage: her past eight novels read like Margaret Drabble rewritten by Patricia Highsmith and are hugely, horribly entertaining. Her latest book, Critical Injuries, should propel her towards a more serious audience...it is a magnificent novel about anger, remorse and the painful attainment of grace....Barfoot's unsentimental voice encompasses humour, anger, power and delicacy...this novel [is] a serious work of literature about the unexpected capacities of the human heart, and a pleasure to read." The Scotsman: "Barfoot takes a shocking but commonplace newspaper story and unfolds the impact of those few seconds on the lives of her characters with deft wisdom, bringing the reality of something that we all too frequently think happens to 'other people' home to roost. Deftly woven, it's an uncompromising, unsentimental meditation on fate, chance and forgiveness." Toronto Star: "Barfoot writes with passion, insight and an extraordinary clarity. Her characters, even such secondary ones as Roddy's father and grandmother, and their relationships to each other, are drawn with such a depth of understanding that one can only marvel. None of them is shortchanged; all are magnificently, awfully human. Each is capable of growth, spiritual evolution, a compelling generosity of the heart. In Barfoot's vision, 'being trusting and hopeful sound like virtues, not stupidities', and redemption can happen to those who truly seek it. Barfoot does not preach, sugarcoat the unpleasant or bore with cliches. She is painstakingly - often painfully - honest. The result is a beautiful book, a must for every discriminating reader's fall list." The Globe and Mail: "There's just one problem that faces the reviewer of a Joan Barfoot novel: Her plots depend upon some element of suspense. Events happen in Critical Injuries that the responsible reviewer does not want to reveal lest some of the pleasure awaiting readers be stolen. I can say, though, that...readers will be swept along in the book's tide, and further, readers will recognize that every paragraph, every sentence, every word in this book counts - which, as it happens, is another of the novel's themes. Barfoot's sentences sing. It's easy to imagine that the author has lived a dozen different lives...Critical Injuries brims with achingly difficult truths; ultimately this is a book about the variants and vagaries of love and generosity of spirit."