A Circle on the Surface

Beautiful writing, a sad setting, during WWII, small town Nova Scotia. A marriage, a war, an unveiling.......more

In the opening chapter of A Circle on the Surface, it is 1956 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Enman Greene has taken his daughter Penelope to a fish & chip shop for her 12th birthday, intending to tell her the truth about her absent mother, Una. Enman’s life is filled with regrets, and subsequent chapters......more

Carol Bruneau's A Circle on the Surface is mesmerizing: the details of WW II life in a small community ring true—as do the responses of the two main characters, Una and Enman, who are both sympathetic and flawed human beings, and the reader is gripped as the story see-saws back and forth between the......more

Carol Bruneau’s novels have a way of comforting and breaking me all at once. Every time. I am a sucker for her writing especially following the tales of real or fictional Nova Scotian’s. Her calm, steady pace of writing leaves me so wrapped up in not only the plot and characters but the landscape an......more

I was mesmerized by this story from the first page. Carol Bruneau crafted a story with a deep sense of place and time (wartime Atlantic Canada). It is beautifully written novel shining a light what it was like to live in an Atlantic coastal community, with its societal and family expectations, durin......more