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From the Governor General's Award winner, a big-hearted new novel about three women in a family and their struggle with the expectations that form them
Ninety-year-old Estella Buckman is the last descendant of a successful manufacturer of clay bricks, sewage pipes and toilets. Attended to by a housekeeper named Emyflor, Estella lives alone in the family home in an upscale old neighbourhood in Regina, lamenting that the once-significant Buckmans have dispersed in a kind of family diaspora, lured by the oil and the lifestyle of Alberta. Estella's solitary life is in part of her own making. As independent-minded as they come, she has fought for everything she has achieved, often struggling against the people she loved best. For much of her youth, she held on to the secret of her father's first marriage, which she discovered along with a bundle of letters when she was a child. The rest of the Buckman family learned of this secret only with their father's last breath.
Who was the mysterious Salina Passmore, and why has her story given Estella a stronger kinship with a long-dead woman than with her own mother, Beatrice? The Diamond House is the story of Estella, Beatrice and Salina, how they carved their places in a world and within a family that didn't expect much of them, and how each defined her own legacy and did everything she could to protect it.
Ninety-year-old Estella Buckman is the last descendant of a successful manufacturer of clay bricks, sewage pipes and toilets. Attended to by a housekeeper named Emyflor, Estella lives alone in the family home in an upscale old neighbourhood in Regina, lamenting that the once-significant Buckmans have dispersed in a kind of family diaspora, lured by the oil and the lifestyle of Alberta. Estella's solitary life is in part of her own making. As independent-minded as they come, she has fought for everything she has achieved, often struggling against the people she loved best. For much of her youth, she held on to the secret of her father's first marriage, which she discovered along with a bundle of letters when she was a child. The rest of the Buckman family learned of this secret only with their father's last breath.
Who was the mysterious Salina Passmore, and why has her story given Estella a stronger kinship with a long-dead woman than with her own mother, Beatrice? The Diamond House is the story of Estella, Beatrice and Salina, how they carved their places in a world and within a family that didn't expect much of them, and how each defined her own legacy and did everything she could to protect it.