The Very Marrow of Our Bones: A Novel

(Paperback)

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Defiance, faith and triumph in a heartrending novel about daughters and mothers.

On a miserable November day in 1967, two women disappear from a working-class town on the Fraser River. The community is thrown into panic, with talk of drifters and murderous husbands. But no one can find a trace of Bette Parsons or Alice McFee. Even the egg seller, Doris Tenpenny, a mute woman to whom everyone tells their secrets, hears nothing.

Ten-year-old Lulu Parsons discovers something, though: a milkstained note her mother, Bette, left for her father on the kitchen table. Wally, it says, I will not live in a tarpaper shack for the rest of my life . . .

Lulu tells no one, and months later she buries the note in the woods. At the age of ten, she starts running and forgetting lurching through her unravelled life, using the safety of solitude and detachment until, at fifty, she learns that she is not the only one who carries a secret.

Hopeful, lyrical, comedic and intriguingly and lovingly told, The Very Marrow of Our Bones explores the isolated landscapes and thorny attachments bred by childhood loss and buried secrets.

"Christine Higdon beautifully and honestly illuminatesthe devastating impact of loss and abuse.The Very Marrow of Our Bonesrefuses to sensationalise, treating its characters with empathy and respect. This hopeful story of kept secrets combines the page-turning intrigue of a mystery with the nuance of a literary novel"Attiya Khan, co-director ofA Better Man

"Higdon's debutnovel is a finely observed chronicle of two women's lives. . .this novel will appeal to readers more interested in the journey than the destination" Publishers Weekly

Reviews

"An ambitious debut novel that will make you cry, cringe, and laugh ... This small-town drama is jam-packed with revelations and sweet portraits that stick." -- Kirkus Reviews
"Canadian librarians in particular will want to pay attention to this debut." -- Booklist Online
"Higdon's debut novel is a finely observed chronicle of two women's lives ... this novel will appeal to readers more interested in the journey than the destination." -- Publishers Weekly
"This wondrous book concerns more than mere detective work, expanding instead on the grander mysteries of love and hate, survival and destruction -- and most powerfully, perhaps, of decades-long journeys home." -- Toronto Star
"Brutal and punishing with occasional grace notes, The Very Marrow of Our Bones is concerned with morbidity -- both the human capacity for it and what people make of it when it becomes the raw material of their lives." -- Foreword Reviews

Author Bio

Christine Higdon is a writer, editor, and graphic designer. She was shortlisted for the 2011 Marina Nemat Award and for the 2016 CBC Creative Nonfiction Prize. Daughter of a Newfoundlander and a British Columbian, Christine lives in Mimico, Ontario, where she hooks rugs, worries about the bees, and longs for either ocean. This is her first novel.