Beyond This Point

Five women retreat to the interior — of a country, of themselves — in an effort to rebuild their lives. Virtuoso writing from an award-winning fiction writer.

Set in the heart of British Columbia, Beyond This Point captures the lives of five women and the hopes and despair that drive them.

Lucinda Markovice, long-time lover of the healer Gabriel at the Centre for Light Awareness in Neon Bar, discovers an affair will have lasting consequences; Lenore Carmichael, a teacher, unhappily married and fearing the worst about her health, tries to go home again to the town of Ruth and finds she has to go farther; Mory Zimmerman, a young woman who has depended on the sale of her body to get by, returns to the valley sick and exhausted, bringing the child that no one wants to remember, as gradually a disturbing tale of abuse is revealed; solid Bet Harker feels she has drifted from the ones she loves and dealing with a rebellious teenage daughter and her husband's recent stroke, reaches out to an estranged friend; Kathleen Elliot, a young widow from the East, is reeling from grief and dislocation when she first arrives in Ruth to stay on the property of old friends, and in the end, her visit changes all their lives. Behind it all is the wildness of the land, the threat of forest fires, and a boy's desire for vengeance, which leads to a harrowing act.

Intense, spellbinding, ultimately redemptive, Beyond This Point takes us beyond the predictable into a world and a community vividly portrayed and peopled with characters we will not soon forget.

Holley Rubinsky is the acclaimed author of At First I Hope for Rescue and Rapid Transits and Other Stories. She has won the Journey Prize and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Fiction. Holley Rubinsky divides her time between British Columbia and Arizona.