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Cover of On the Rocks

On the Rocks

by Sue Hallgarth

The year is 1929 and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Willa Cather and her partner Edith Lewis are summering on Grand Manan, an island in the Bay of Fundy. In their cottage's sparsely-furnished attic room, Cather is at work writing Shadows on the Rock, her tenth novel. Relaxing after a hectic winter of working at a New York City ad agency, J. Walter Thompson, Edith is painting watercolors from the cliffs two hundred feet above the rising tides of Whale Cove. Out of the corner of her eye, Edith sees a body plunge from the edge of a cliff to the rocks below...

Solving the mystery, first-time novelist Sue Hallgarth's intimate view of village politics and the goings-on of two women s communities long lost to history is also a suspenseful and surprising crime novel. Hallgarth draws the reader into a unique retreat, stimulating conversations about literature and art, and an inside glimpse of the lives of a great American novelist and her talented life partner.

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Publisher: Arbor Farm Press

Date: 2013

ISBN: 9780985520007

Location: Grand Manan, New Brunswick

Sub-genres: Historical , Women Sleuths

About The Author

Sue Hallgarth is a novelist and Willa Cather and Edith Lewis scholar. A former faculty member and administrator at Empire State College/State University of New York and William Woods University, she held a fellowship (1994-1995) from the American Council of Learned Societies to work on a biography of Willa Cather, and she was a visiting fellow at Princeton University and Rutgers University. From 1987-1996 she also served as a writing consultant and editor for the National Council for Research on Women. Since moving to New Mexico in 1997, she lives on an acre in Corrales, New Mexico, a small rural village outside of Albuquerque, with her partner of 30 years, and their household includes two horses, a miniature donkey, ten chickens, and five dogs.

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