"Tending Memory is an exquisite and powerful book. The journey of Michaela, her memories and stories, touch on myth and history. How do we seeourselves? What is the meaning of the past? What is important to us?  These are the questions that enthrall the reader as she becomes immersed in the mysterious Michaela and those who share her life. The characters and settings are entirely real and memorable, the writing textured and vibrant. I could not put this book down and re-read many passages for the joy of the language. I have been awaiting a book like this - and here it is: a miracle."

~Veronica Ross, author of To Experience Wonder Edna Staebler A Life andother books.

"With Tending Memory, novelist Marianne Paul once again astonishes and delights. Exploring the strained and often blurred boundaries between truth and lies, orthodoxy and heresy, love and sex, and fact and fiction, Paul draws her readers to the edge of certainty and then subtly but conclusively disorients us. Her precise and understated prose exposes the rigid social mores of European gypsy culture, the two solitudes of eastern Ontario, and the harsh realities which often hide beneath the veneer of Christian ideals. Paul reveals the strength and resiliency of a woman's soul: the raw, uncensored emotions of childhood and the quiet, resigned grief of old age, the selfish - and indeed ruthless - passions of the young and the shocking -and sometimes painful - moment awakening. Tending Memory is, quite simply,an absolute must read."

~ Ginny Freeman MacOwan

Editor, Vox Feminarum: The Canadian Journal of Feminist Spirituality

ABOUT TENDING MEMORY

Abandoned at an early age, one parent simply packing and leaving, the other suffering an unexpected death, Michaela is raised by her grandparents. Precocious and independent, she runs away for the first time when she is four, and for the final time when she is fifteen. To survive on the street, Michaela scams her way to food and a dry place to sleep. She meets Thomas when she hides out in a seminary library, disguising her female body in baggy clothes, passing time reading books on the lives of the church fathers and saints. A scholar and would-be priest, Thomas thinks he is simply doing a good deed when he invites the runaway to stay with him.

Michaela doesn't look like the gypsy traveller she claims to be. Pale as the moon, body rake-thin, hair cropped short and the colour of corn silk, she weaves with gypsy ardor the tale of her Rom origin and her olive-skinned parents. With each new telling, the currents of story and memory shift like the direction of the wind along the open road.

To Michaela, home is not a location. She carries it with her in the same way she carries her memories. She is always destined to leave.