Let Me Be the One - Hardcover

Canadian Elisabeth Harvor, poet and fiction writer, crafts eight distinct female protagonists in this outstanding collection of short stories. Echoing the note of yearning implied in the title, each resilient character faces shocks and disappointments in the realms of family, love, and sex.

“Elisabeth Harvor’s beautiful and fluid stories capture moments in people’s lives with a rare moral clarity....And what an artist she is....”
–Edmonton Journal

“Splendid....These fine stories mock their eerie ironies and invite us to share their powerfully rendered concerns.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“Harvor brilliantly evokes a sense of something ominous lurking just out of sight, just beyond everyday consciousness – and undercuts her own dizzying effects with touches of black humour.”
–New Brunswick Reader

“Let Me Be the One sets out to recreate a feeling state, and does it....[Harvor’s] stories are as precise and emotionally accurate as poetry....”
–Globe and Mail

“[These stories] hum with sexual tension....”
–Toronto Star

“Harvor demonstrates her prowess in this sparkling collection of stories. Readers are held in the grip of her characters’ predicaments as with a precise, original voice her straightforward prose – utterly devoid of gimmicks – flawlessly builds to glimmering resolutions, or irresolutions, as the case may be.”
–Booklist

“The characters’ yearnings seem painfully, beautifully ardent and real.”
–Other Voices

“[Her characters are] alive with hope...and a kind of subversiveness that gives them, and their stories, an edge....Harvor creates fiction that has remarkable staying power.”
–Maclean’s