Showing A Recipe for Bees by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Following the international success ofÿThe Cure for Death by Lightning, Gail Anderson-Dargatz has written an extraordinary and beguiling second novel. A "foray backwards in time",ÿA Recipe for Beesÿis the telling of a woman's life: Augusta Olsen, a farmer's daughter, then a farmer's wife, living in the isolation-- desolation--of rural Canada. Conjuring that landscape and its time, the photos from Anderson-Dargatz's family album scattered throughout the book suggest that this is an obscurely personal narrative, a testimony to the many "strange tales" and the unique loves that lives lived so close to the land can solicit. Sometimes painful, often pitiless--the possibility of a slow death from loneliness and frustration on her husband's farm haunts the young Augusta--A Recipe for Beesÿis on the side of a visionary bid for life: the resistance and resource which drives Augusta to manufacture love as she manufactures honey, forging pleasure through friendship, family, narrative--and the strange world of bees.