The Shunning

"Kitchener writer Marianne Paul's first novel is a beautifully crafted book... Paul has woven two stories into an intriguing whole. The two main characters are women located in the same area of eastern Ontario, but they live a century apart. The similarities between them are striking, as are the gifts which set them apart. Paul, who won the Record's short story contest in 1993, received a Canada Council grant to write this novel. It was a good investment."

~Carol Ross Williamson, The Record, 1994

"I first read Marianne Paul's The Shunning late last summer and found it a delightful first novel... This book explores what it means to be gifted, to move out into the imagination and to be hauled back to the "real" world. There is a constant tensions between interior and exterior geographies. The eddies of the structure and writing style reflect chaos/order of these
people's lives. Clear prose sentences anchor the story. Single words,
phrases, fragments lap around them."

~ Judith Miller, Waterloo Chronicle, 1994

"The Shunning is an incredibly well-written novel. It lends itself more to a
literary analysis than a book review. The depth of ideas and care in the
story is overwhelming."

~ Becky Norman, Motive Magazine, 1994

About The Shunning

The Shunning tells the passionate story of two extraordinary women: Aley
Pierce, a fiercely independent writer with an uncanny affinity for water and
a strong will to live life on her own terms, and Elizabeth Barnes, a water
dowser and clairvoyant living in the same vicinity but a century earlier. As
the lives unfold along strangely similar paths, the two women gradually come
to know themselves, to accept and nourish their uniqueness and their
talents, and to stand by their convictions despite severe obstacles and
rejections.

ISBN 0-920259-51-0