I loved this book, truly deserving of the word “romp” through the lives of four octogenarians. Barfoot’s writing is wise and wry as she ponders life’s big questions with wit. We see characters who are fleshed out, passionate people behind the old-age camouflage of invisibility. I laughed and comm...
After years of disappointment, forty-nine-year-old Isla is finally content in her second marriage to Lyle. Seventeen-year-old Roddy, on the other hand, is a faltering student, and occasional shoplifter trying to make sense of his life. Their worlds collide one hot August afternoon when a fake rob...
Barfoot likes to play with how the obvious in people can be so wrong. And she does this very well, again, in Luck, where she adds the ambivalence of luck, especially that of perceived luck, both good and bad. The stage upon which Barfoot's characters explore luck is in the extended quasi-family d...
From the author of GAINING GROUND, a novel about fidelity. A married man and his mistress decide to take a long discussed holiday together, but on their flight out their aeroplane catches fire, a potential calamity which prompts the woman to view her paramour in an entirely new, and quite unflatt...
It must be somewhere in that house. Under a bed, or in the corner of a closet? My days were a service, a mass: precise steps and motions, all in order, to the end of either worship or comfort, whichever. Or both. He never asked me to do it. We never set it out in words. But he must have assumed I...
said Herb, and they were off. It was the only time she wore it, and then only briefly. He might have admired it, but like a gift, only as wrapping for what he was really after. “For God’s sake, June,” he said, “we’re married.” And then, “For heaven’...