Excessive joy injures the heart - Couverture rigide

Elisabeth Harvor is the highly acclaimed author of the national bestselling novel Excessive Joy Injures the Heart, and three collections of short fiction, If Only We Could Drive Like This Forever, Our Lady of All the Distances, and most recently Let Me Be the One, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She is also the author of two poetry books, Fortress of Chairs, which won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and The Long Cold Green Evenings of Spring.

Harvor was the winner of the Alden Nowlan Award for the year 2000. Her fiction has been anthologized in Canada, the U.S., and Europe, and has appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, The Malahat Review, and The Hudson Review. Harvor has been writer-in-residence at universities and libraries across Canada, and has also taught in creative writing programs at Concordia University, York University, and the Humber School for Writers.

Elisabeth Harvor has two sons, and lives in Ottawa.

Anxious, insomniac, and adrift in her life, Claire Vornoff drives out into the country to become a patient of Declan Farrell, and an education of sorts begins. An iconoclastic practitioner of alternative medicine, Farrell is magnetic and unsettling, and Claire tries in vain to resist him. As she dreams her way through her life, all the while refusing to listen to her friend Libi's dire pronouncements, her attachment to Declan Farrell deepens, and soon she finds herself caught up in a series of unexpected and startling events.
Set mainly in Ottawa and Toronto, this stunning novel charts the anatomy of obsession, capturing along the way the dilemmas of contemporary urban life. Harvor creates an erotically charged atmosphere, always alert to the pathos of love's ambiguities. Bold, original, astute, and above all deeply human, Excessive Joy Injures the Heart reveals things about us we didn't know we knew. This is truly an outstanding debut.