Jane and Eugenie Ingrams are mirror-image twins, two halves of a whole, each understanding her world through the other. But their parents are less perfectly matched. When the couple separates and their father urges the girls to return with him to their rural home, Eugenie agrees for the sake of her sister—an ultimately tragic concession.
Years later, Jane works as a writer in Vancouver creating rich, fabulist tales with her lover Simon, a gifted illustrator. Estranged from her parents and haunted by her secret family history, Jane finds solace in these stories of extraordinary characters—a girl who trades her laughter for a scalpful of cobwebs; a lonely child with unquenchable thirst; an orphan with the gift, or curse, of prophecy. Within the stories lie clues to Jane’s past, of which Simon knows nothing.
At once wondrous and psychologically compelling, The Perpetual Ending is an exploration of love and artistry that shows the world in all of its grotesqueness and beauty—and uncovers the surprising ways we can arrive at the heart of one story through the telling of others.
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"Kristen den Hartog’s dark, tender first novel reveals her as a sort of literary younger sister to Alice Munro, plumbing the landscape of small-town southern Ontario to turn up stories of sexual discontent and childhood secrets. den Hartog also has a Munroesque knack for dropping shocks into a plot as casually as pebbles from a dock. The enduring sense of den Hartog’s story, whose plot works like a shell game, is that mysteries revealed are definitely not mysteries solved."—Quill & Quire
"Glorious . . . a novel of considerable delicacy."—National Post
"Den Hartog is mistress of the insightful non-sequitur, and she writes about childhood trauma in the same surreal way it actually presents itself in life . . . she has succeeded beautifully"—The Calgary Herald
"The author ... proves adept at peeling away layers of her characters' lives to expose the common tragedy at their core."—The Hamilton Spectator
"Kristen den Hartog is a gifted writer who uses words to fashion haunting, heartbreakingly beautiful images for the reader to savor and reckon with. In The Perpetual Ending she deals with one of the deepest kinds of sibling bonds, that of twins. Through her lyrical prose, we are invited into a landscape charged with raw and passionate emotions. By the end of the novel I was left aching and yet uplifted, thankful that there are writers like Kristen den Hartog, who are capable of transporting us into the very heart of what life is all about."—Carol A. Ortlip, author of We Became Like a Hand: A Story of Five Sisters
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