Books by Leslie Hall Pinder

Pinder's The Indulgence resonates with our times. It is a courtroom drama about what happens when love turns to hate and everyone turns to the law. The endorsements say it all: "The Indulgence is a gripping, powerful read. The protagonist, actress Lucinda Yates, is a compellingly original character, wonderfully impossible to categorize. She is articulate and self-reflecting; her sexuality is in free flow; she belongs to no camp. Yet she is caught in the compulsion of a ruinous, limiting relationship. Hers is an heroic struggle to escape the tragedy of falling in love with someone who does not have the capacity to return that love." Juliet Stevenson, British stage and screen actress (Truly, Madly, Deeply; Bend it Like Beckham; Lawrence Olivier Award, Best Actress) "The book is wonderful, full of elegance, and the narrative - not to mention the writing - so powerful. Such story-telling. A triumph." Hugh Brody, filmmaker and author (Maps and Dreams; The Other Side of Eden) "This is a powerful, blistering novel, a startling premise, a page turner, beautifully written, a novel that will remain with me for a long time. There are so many layers, such a myriad of involving and troubling themes that left me thinking way beyond the page... [A] cracking story, one that engages the reader right down to the wire." Gillian Stern, freelance editor in the U.K.

Bring Me One of Everything is a novel which weaves real-life facts and fiction into an eloquent tale of suspense and intrigue. The title of the book is based on what the management of the Smithsonian is said to have demanded when sending ethnographers to native villages to gather artifacts for its collection: "Bring me one of everything." The novel is several layered stories centered around a troubled writer, Alicia Purcell, who has been commissioned to create the libretto for an opera about an anthropologist named Austin Hart. He earned fame in the 1950s for cutting down and bringing back to museums the largest remaining stand of totem poles in the world. They belonged to the Haida tribes who inhabit the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia. Hart's subsequent suicide creates the mystery Alicia attempts to solve as she consults present-day tribe members, Hart's friends and family, and his personal journals. Added to the complications of her search are Alicia's imperious though ailing mother, a cast-off lover, a narcissistic composer, and her own demons of disaffection. But an overarching question dogs her and the reader: why she is so obsessed with Austin Hart and this quest?

UNDER THE HOUSE is the story of the Rathbones, a prominent Saskatchewan family who live with a secret they're determined to keep. Only young Evelyn finds the courage to break down the wall of silence that keeps the truth at bay. Her ally is Aunt Maude, a timid woman who has lived with the secret from childhood. The secret made her different, the butt of playground jokes. The secret was like the apples in the cellar under the house - rotting, sticky and soft. It is timing that gives this novel its strength, from the confused wanderings of Aunt Maude at the start to the unanswered letter from her sister which ends it. Along the way, Leslie Hall Pinder gives herself every opportunity, right down to a courtroom scene, for sensation and melodrama, and skillfully resists each one in favor of her long-term aim: the creation of a family so determined not to look back at their past that they never see the chains binding them to it.