EXTENSIONS

Winner of the 2011 Peoples Choice Award and Giller longlist Nominee

When she makes the chance discovery of a framed sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister, RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes sets out to learn how a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, BC wound up at a garage sale in small-town Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later. As Arabella sifts through caches of longforgotten letters and unearths long-buried memories, she pieces together the heartbreaking truth at the centre of her family history, and resolves a nearly century-old murder. In her debut novel, Myrna Dey skilfully moves back and forth etween two time periods and two memorably resourceful heroines. EXTENSIONS combines a relatable present day story about a woman dealing with the loss of her mother and the end of a romantic relationship with a gripping, powerful mystery revolving around her great-grandmother and an unsolved Infanticide. The period setting of the pre-WWI hardscrabble mining town is vividly evoked, as is the sense of how history continues to reach into the present.The premise keys into the public's ongoing fascination with the process of investigating one's family origins and would remind one of Possession by A.S. Byatt