In The Golden Thread, Ann Copeland's last book of stories, Claire Delaney emerged from her convent after eleven years as a nun. That book won Copeland a place as a finalist for the 1990 Governor General's Award for fiction.

Now, in the linked stories in Strange Bodies on a Stranger Shore, Copeland takes Claire into the complicated territory of middle age. As her oldest son starts college, Claire revisits her young self, when she followed the call to religious life and later the mature knowledge that she must leave it.

Moving between the present and the past, Claire steers a tricky path among midlife joys and responsibilities, from the grace of "Another Christmas," to the physical intensity of "Leaving the World," to the angry, provisional resolution of "Rupture."