A Harsh and Private Beauty

By Kate Kelly

A Harsh and Private Beauty, is about the life and loves of Ruby Grace, now in her 89th year, on a train journey with her granddaughter back to Chicago, the city of her birth. When the book opens, Ruby is living in a retirement care home, but as a young woman, she was a jazz and blues singer, once trained for a career in opera. The novel traces Ruby’s grandparent’s immigration from Ireland to New York City, her father, Daniel Kenny’s life in 1920s Chicago—the era of gangsters, nightclubs, rum-running and Prohibition—and Ruby’s subsequent life in Montreal and Toronto. Headstrong and talented, Ruby struggled with the conventions of the times, was trapped in a marriage that forced her to give up her singing career, and in love with another man who shares her passion for music. Now, on the train headed back to a city she cannot remember, to a daughter she hardly knows, Ruby tries to look honestly at herself and the choices she has made, choices that affected not only her children, but her grandchildren. Ruby has a stroke on route, leaving the disconnected story of her life and love in the hands of her granddaughter, Lisa, who must reveal a secret to her father, Ruby’s son, that her grandmother guarded all her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inanna Poetry and Fiction Series
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771336642

Kate Kelly

Kate Kelly has had a life-long love affair with books, but writing came in fits and starts. She didn't take it seriously until her forties. Now she can't get along without it. She has the good fortune to live on the east coast of Canada with her husband (the children have flown away). She writes, grow herbs and perennials and sails when the wind blows her way.

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