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From Amazon
Winner of the 1999 Governor General's Award for fiction, Elizabeth and After is in every way a first-rate novel, set in a Matt Cohen version of small-town Ontario somewhere near Kingston, a mythic setting similar to that of Cohen's acclaimed Salem Quartet novels. Elizabeth is dead when the novel begins, killed more than a decade earlier in a terrible car accident. Her son, Carl, who was driving drunk, was uninjured and bears a survivor's guilt. After a decade-long exile in British Columbia, Carl has returned to West Gull, in part to make amends for his violent temper and his drunkenness, which have cost him not only his wife and daughter but also any vestige of respect that might once have been his. But this isn't just Carl's story--it's also that of his shiftless father, William; of Adam Goldsmith, a small-town accountant and Elizabeth's confidant and lover; of Luke Richardson, whose family has always controlled West Gull and who "rescued" Carl's ex-wife, Chrissy; and, of course, of Elizabeth herself. Elizabeth and After is a rich and wonderful novel, by turns quirky and humorous, heart-breakingly erotic, and wrenchingly painful, with an overwhelming sense of decades-old humiliations, losses, and mistakes. In handling these complex layers of emotional history, Cohen's touch is always deft. He is able to reach into the most painful depths of Carl McKelvey's soul and, at the same time, to fill the novel with the late Elizabeth's evanescent energy. She changed the lives of everyone in West Gull, whether they knew it or not, and she changes our lives as well. --Jeffrey Canton
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