Books by Ann Copeland

Ann Copeland has lived a mountain of yesterdays as a teacher, fiction writer, vowed religious, wife, and mother. Throughout her rich and varied life, there has been one constant: Copeland's dedication to amateur music-making in its many forms - composing, playing, arranging, partnering, studying, and improvising - and in its many possible settings-alone or with others; in chapels, living rooms, and schools; in locations foreign and domestic, intimate and exposed; in mental states anxious, playful, and grieving. This collection of spirited and engaging essays tells the story of a lifelong student and devotee of music who, looking back, sees that "years of making music offered release, challenge, solace, collaboration, glimpses of possibility, a perishable entrance into felt mystery, and the chance to create a gift with and for others." With this book, Copeland is sharing that gift through the story of her life making music.

In "Season of Apples," Ann Copeland shows men and women of all ages wrestling with life's changes and surprising themselves with their own sudden growth. She endows her characters with passion and thoughtful courage, and she tells their unique stories with her special brand of good humour.

The Golden Thread introduces Claire Delaney, an ambitious, idealistic and highly rational young woman called to be a nun. In these eleven stories, readers hear the joy of praise, feel the itch of stockings and habit, taste the gall of obedience, and, finally, share the pain and delight when Claire renounces her vows and embraces the secular life.

In "The Golden Thread," Ann Copeland's last book of stories, Claire Delaney emerged from her convent after eleven years as a nun. That book won Copeland a place as a finalist for the 1990 Governor General's Award for fiction.Now, in the linked stories in "Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore," Copeland takes Claire into the complicated territory of middle age. As her oldest son starts college, Claire revisits her young self, when she followed the call to religious life and later the mature knowledge that she must leave it.Moving between the present and the past, Claire steers a tricky path among midlife joys and responsibilities, from the grace of "Another Christmas," to the physical intensity of "Leaving the World," to the angry, provisional resolution of "Rupture."