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list price: $19.95
edition:Paperback
also available: Paperback eBook
category: Fiction
published: Nov 2004
ISBN:9780889614512
publisher: Three O'Clock Press
imprint: Women's Press Literary

No Crystal Stair

by Mairuth Sarsfield

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Description

No Crystal Stair is an absorbing novel that explores an increasingly difficult contemporary reality: functioning as though White while surviving as Black.Marion Willow, a proud young widow, must work at two jobs to ensure that her three girls develop lifestyles not hindered by class and colour. The bittersweet experience of Marion's elegant American expatriate neighbour, Torrie Delacourt, could help the girls survive Canada's subtle racism, which, though not legislated, wounds and herns them in. But the women's rivalry for the love of Edmund Thompson, a handsome railway porter, pits them against one another.With humour and sensitivity, No Crystal Stair reveals both the conflict and the human heart of the proud, tightly knit Black community of the Little Burgundy district of Quebec in the mid-forties. It recaptures the days when Montreal was a cosmopolitan hub. It was a city inhabited by jazz musicians, cafe society, artists, gangsters - those whose world revolved around Rockhead's Paradise - and others who clung to the community church at the end of prohibition, the depression and the anxious years of World War II.

About the Author

Mairuth Sarsfield

Born in Montreal in 1925, Mairuth Sarsfield was an author, activist, journalist, researcher and diplomat. She was one of the first Black women appointed to the CBC Board of Directors. She worked for Foreign Affairs at Expo 67 in Montreal and at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. As senior information officer for the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi, Kenya, she created the international campaign For Every Child a Tree. In 1986, Sarsfield received the Chevalier de l'ordre national du Québec. Mairuth Sarsfield died in 2013 at the age of 88.

Contributor Notes

Mairuth Sarsfield was born and bred in Montreal and has lived and worked in New York; East and West Africa; Washington, D.C.; Papua New Guinea; and Japan. She is the recipient of the Chevalier de l'Ordre national du Quebec, and was honoured in Cleveland, Ohio, with a "Mairuth Sarsfield Day." She has also served as communications expert on global information themes for the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi. Mairuth lives on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, with her husband, Dominic.

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