Rather a Ruby

About the Book

In this sweeping, panoramic saga, Edna Porczeny-Dalrymple, the reclusive and enigmatic doyenne of Canadian Literary Fiction, finds her place in the pantheon of immortal storytellers. She spins a riveting yarn equally composed of deep human drama and devastating satire. Not only Canadians, but readers everywhere, will identify with its universal message of life and its never-ending struggles with nature and humanity’s darker emotions. Perhaps not since John Kennedy Toole’s "A Confederacy of Dunces" has any author, anywhere, captured life’s ironies and plumbed its depths with such skill and vision.

Set in and around the Saskatchewan prairie town of Medicine Jaw, "Rather a Ruby" follows the story of Catherine Turnbull, a 40-year-old neurotic virgin with a shameful secret that has haunted her for half her life, and the man fate has capriciously thrown in her path, Doctor Kevin MacKevitt. Tossed with almost random panache into the mix are MacKevitt’s faithless Hungarian wife Diana, his alcoholic lawyer friend Brian Waistcoat, and Jerry Dee, an escaped American serial murderer. A host of supporting characters includes an ill-starred TV director, a North Dakota sheriff, a young American doctor obsessed with the idea that Canadian women are mysterious and exotic, and a good-natured, slovenly handyman who just may be Elvis Presley.

But the real “star” of "Rather a Ruby" is the weather, always there, bringing death and devastation, romance and joy, on its capricious wings of change. It triggers suicides, blizzards, floods…even murder.

"Rather a Ruby" will challenge you; it will enrich you. When you finish this heroic tale, you will be forever changed.

About the Author

Edna Porczeny-Dalrymple was born seventy-four years ago in Moose Hat, Saskatchewan while her father, Ferenc Porczeny, a Budapest-born archaeology professor at the University of Flin Flon in Manitoba, was on a dig. Edna’s mother, Euphonia Dalrymple, was a Scottish-Canadian from a military family of many generations’ standing. Edna attended, and was graduated from, King Edward VIII High School in Moose Hat, where her intellectual gifts won her a full scholarship to Toronto’s prestigious Royal College of Beauty and Hair Design. She took a two-year sabbatical in 1940, to give aid and comfort to Canadian servicemen returning from World War II. One of them, Herschel Hendershot, became her first of five husbands, all of whom died prematurely of what medical authorities termed “acute chronic postcoital fatigue.” Between bouts of grief, Ms. Porczeny-Dalrymple earned a degree in English Literature from Juan Peron University in Sin Vegüenza, Argentina, where she lived while recovering from the loss of her fifth husband, Sir Pauncefoot Foxglove, Great Britain’s ambassador to Greenland. She took up poetry at that time, first seeing print with her brief bit of whimsy, the oft-quoted poem “Lars.” It is reproduced immediately below. Lars grew figs in North Kadota; Ev’ry year he met his quota. Then, in Nineteen-Sixty-Two, Lars’s figs just never grew. Now he’s a dustman in Toronto. Ms. Porczeny-Dalrymple lives in an imposing home on the windward shore of Lake Winnipegosis in Manitoba with her German shepherd Helmut, a 28-year-old from Stuttgart.