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list price: $12.99
edition:eBook
also available: Paperback Paperback
category: Fiction
published: May 2015
ISBN:9781770864269
publisher: Cormorant Books

These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

tagged: literary, war & military, historical, biographical
Description

Set in the early autumn of 1943, the These Good Hands interweaves the biography of French sculptor Camille Claudel and the story of the nurse who cares for her during the final days of her thirty-year incarceration in France's Montdevergues Asylum. Biographers have suggested that Claudel survived her long internment by writing letters, few of which left the asylum because of her strict sequestration; in Bruneau's novel, these letters are reimagined in a series, penned to her younger self, the sculptor, popularly known as Rodin's tragic mistress. They trace the trajectory of her career in Belle Époque Paris and her descent into the stigmatizing illness that destroyed it. The nurse's story is revealed in her journal, which describes her labours and the ethical dilemma she eventually confronts. Through her letters, Camille relives the limits of her perseverance, and through her journal, Nurse confronts the limits of hers; these limits include the faith these women have in themselves, in the then-current advances in psychiatric medicine, and in a God whose existence is challenged by the war raging outside the enclosed world of the asylum. In her dying days, Camille teaches the nurse lessons in compassion and, ultimately, in what it means to endure.

About the Author

Carol Bruneau is the author of eleven books: four short story collections, including Threshold, one work of nonfiction, No Ordinary Magic: the Art of Laurie Swim, and six novels. These include Purple for Sky, A Circle on the Surface, and These Good Hands, a novel based on the life and art of sculptor Camille Claudel, and most recently, Brighten the Corner Where You Are: A Novel Inspired by the Life of Maud Lewis, longlisted for the 2022 International Dublin Literary Award.

Her fiction has been published internationally. Her articles, short fiction, and literary and visual arts reviews have appeared nationwide in journals and newspapers, and her stories and essays in various anthologies.

A past winner of the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and two Dartmouth Book Awards, Bruneau lives and writes in Halifax/Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia/Mi'kmaki.

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