Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch
“Canadian author Joan Barfoot has been compared most favourably with fellow countrywoman Margaret Atwood, and this sharply observant narrative about two very different women friends evaluating their lives demonstrates why.”
—Ms. Magazine (UK)
One old woman crouches in a hedge, spying on a long-ago married lover. The other is the recent widow of a lifelong philanderer. Charlotte and Claudia have had quite different lives, one a single career social worker, the other a married career mother, but they’ve been friends since their youth, with the sort of bone-deep affection that comes of decades-long knowledge. Now at seventy, they’re getting together to compare secrets and lives over the necessities of chocolate and wine.
From the reviews
Canberra Times (Australia): “With humour and perspicacity, Joan Barfoot creates a portrait of two lifelong friends who still have surprising, even shocking things to learn about each other….A quietly compulsive read.”
Toronto Star: “Joan Barfoot continues her impressive work as a novelist with a story about two very different women, friends over six decades…The pages are filled with shocks and discoveries and startling truths.”
London Free Press: “This book is intelligent, mildly comical and rich in detail and convincing characterization. Its thoughtful look at the follies and comforts of female friendship and at the vagaries of marriage, motherhood, the single option and old age are unblinking and astringent, yet leavened with compassion and rare good humour.”
Toronto Sun: “Canadian Joan Barfoot’s new novel is amazingly good. It puts me in mind of the ruminative passages in Margaret Drabble or the quieter bits in Alice Munro, or most of all, the growing-old section of Carol Shields’ The Stone Diaries…Barfoot knows exactly what she is trying to achieve here in her tidy, thoughtful, third-person stream-of-consciousness narration of the lives of two elderly women. She is trying to define the nature of love.”
Georgia Straight: “As an ode to friendship, to secrets told and secrets kept, Charlotte and Claudia is both wry and revealing. In it, we meet two colourful, sympathetic characters struggling to maintain their dignity and passion.”
