Alone in the Classroom

Book excerpt: Hay is the winner of the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Ottawa Book Prize, and the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year for her novel Late Nights on Air. Hay's fourth novel, Alone in The Classroom is a Globe and Mail Best Book. In a small prairie school in 1929, Connie Flood helps a struggling student, Michael Graves, learn how to read. Observing them and darkening their lives is the principal, Parley Burns, whose strange behavior culminates in an attack so disturbing its repercussions continue to the present day. Connie's niece, Anne, tells the story. Impelled by curiosity about her dynamic, adventurous aunt and her more conventional mother, she revisits Connie's past and her mother's broken childhood. In the process she unravels the enigma of Parley Burns and the mysterious, and unrelated, deaths of two young girls. As the novel moves deeper into their lives, the triangle of principal, teacher, student opens out into other emotional triangles--aunt, niece, lover; mother, daughter, granddaughter--until a sudden, capsizing love thrusts Anne herself into a newly independent life. This spellbinding tale--set in Saskatchewan and the Ottawa Valley--crosses generations and cuts to the bone. It probes the roots of obsessive love and hate, how the hurts and desires of childhood persist and are passed on, as if in the blood. It lays bare the urgency of discovering what we were never told about the past. And it celebrates the process of becoming who we are in a world full of startling connections that lie just out of sight. From the Hardcover edition.