Samara the Wholehearted

Nancy Bauer has the ability to create some of the most memorable female characters in contemporary literature. For Samara the Wholehearted, she has written a coming-of-age story, centred around Samara, an imaginative young woman whose maturity is marked by an impulsive examination of the inner life. A profoundly religious writer with a lively interest in Eastern spirituality, Bauer transports her readers in this novel to the slightly tilted world of Summerland, a communal summer retreat. Here she introduces Samara, her perpetually adolescent half-brother Fred, a disabled genius named Marty and a host of off-beat characters who form an unusual extended family in a world filled with marvel. Mixing rarefied prose with the traditional techniques of story-telling and post-modern innovation, Bauer produces a novel which is both technically adept and intensely memorable.