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by Linda Spalding
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Like Ruskin for a new age, Spalding brilliantly interweaves her own life and her subject’s in this story of a sensational murder case. In 1982, as Linda Spalding was about to leave Hawaii and embark on a new life in Canada, she was called to jury duty, sitting for the trial of a young woman charged with murder. Maryann Acker was Mormon, eighteen years old, and married to a petty crook and hustler who had hauled her into a life that led eventually to murder on a hillside above one of Hawaii’s most beautiful beaches. Twenty years later, Spalding stumbles across the journal she kept through the trial, tracks down Maryann, who is still in jail, and begins a journey into memory, into the twists of fate that spin two lives down such different trajectories. The story is Maryann’s but it is also Spalding’s, as subject and writer overlap. Like the work of John Ruskin, Linda Spalding’s writing brilliantly combines autobiography with the examination of an external subject and, in doing so, offers us profound insights into the vagaries of the human heart.
about the author
Linda Spalding was born in Kansas and lived in Mexico and Hawaii before immigrating to Toronto in 1982. She is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, Daughters of Captain Cook, The Paper Wife, and (with her daughter Esta) Mere. Her non-fiction work, The Follow, was shortlisted for the Trillium Award and the Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize. She has been awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary community.
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Linda Spalding
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