Black writes with a wonderful sense of place, as she takes the reader back to a “not so” gentler time. 

A comfortable, yet suitably disturbing read about secrets and the ever-present of the past. 

-Robert Rotenberg

Author of the bestselling ONE MINUTE MORE.

At once a searing portrait of rural life at the turn of 19thcentury Canada, profound family drama, and a dark mystery, Lucy E.M. Black’s A Quilting of Scars takes the reader on a tumultuous journey from the ashes of a tragic fire to the revelation of secrets and recriminations that burn just as deeply. 

-Anthony Bidulka

Author of Going to Beautiful, winner of Crime Writers of Canada Best Crime Novel, and the Merry Bell mysteries.

A Quilting of Scars by Lucy E.M. Black is a gorgeously textured story of the brutality and sorrows of submerged identity and trauma. Set in the early 1900s in rural Ontario, Black’s writing is stylistically cinematic and thematically universal. Her masterful use of the historical fiction genre serves to amplify human behaviour, allowing us to take it out of our current context and place it in an uncluttered setting that is free of contemporaneous issues and distractions. The effect is a deftly-crafted character-driven narrative that’s as breathtaking as it is shattering.

-Hollay Ghadery

Author of Fuse, Rebellion Box, and Widow Fantasies 

Aging bachelor Larkin Beattie is still haunted by a decades-old double murder on the next farm over. Folks assume his childhood friend Paul killed his abusive father and brother. Larkin knows things others don’t. 

Hearty as a farm-cooked meal and resonant with Lucy E. M. Black’s spot-on period dialogue and detail, A Quilting of Scars is the story of a reserved, plain-spoken man and the unsettling friendship that shapes his life. Larkin Beattie will linger with you long after you’ve finished reading this remarkable book.

-K.R. Wilson

Author of Call Me Stan and An Idea About My Dead Uncle

Lucy E.M. Black’s aptly named A Quilting of Scars is written with grace and depth of character. As with all of her moving historical fiction, Lucy immerses her reader in details. In this early 20th century Canadian story, she touches on animal husbandry, small town life, illness, religious zeal, guilt, shame, and the burden of secrets. The novel moves back and forth in time at a moving pace and yet with delicate sensitivity. There is profound loneliness in protagonist Larkin, ashamed of who he might be, and yet somehow, throughout his life he held his ground, ‘lest he disappear into the blackness.’ Larkin contemplates how a life might have unfolded differently if he’d been able to trust and share closely guarded secrets and not rub sadness deeper into his pores.   

-Gail Kirkpatrick

Author of Sleepers and Ties

Lucy Black has done it again. In “A Quilting of Scars,” she has created a delightful novel set in the late Victorian and early Edwardian era. We find ourselves plunged into the fictitious rural Ontario community of Murton, somewhere in the quiet landscape of Grey and Simcoe counties. On the first page we are immediately thrust into the sights, sound and aromas of farming life through the life of Larkin Beattie, a farmer with a love of horses. Ms. Black draws us into the deeply personal life of this practical man, a bachelor with unrequited, thwarted romances. We join him in his daily chores and social encounters, discreet and otherwise.  We understand, and identify with his inner pleasures and his anguish. 

Running through this skillfully crafted historical novel, are unobtrusive, yet relevant mysteries and secrets that keep the reader closely attached to the narrative. Even in the dialogue, with its vocabulary, colloquialisms and phrasing from more than a century ago, we are spirited back to that seemingly less complicated era. But it was still a time of hidden stresses.  

Throughout the work we are constantly reminded that, in spite of our present-day advances in technology and communication, human nature remains a constant throughout history. A delightful read. 

-Paul Arculus

Writer and historian 

In A Quilting of Scars, Lucy E.M. Black weaves a murder mystery through the threads of farm life in the early twentieth century, expertly and delectably unfolding the intrigue with the everyday. Black uses cadence, dialect, and honed insight to immerse the reader in the life and psyche of Larkin Beattie — farmer, friend, and secret holder. We get poignant and fascinating glimpses into the hardships and joys of rural existence in Ontario’s past through the eyes of a man wracked with guilt, betrayal, and remorse.  

-H&A Christensen

Authors of Stealing John Hancock

Lucy E.M. Black’s mellifluous prose conjures a lost world, steeped in love of family, memory, and the quiet echoes of regret. In Larkin, she crafts a character who carries the weight of grief, loss, and guilt, each shaping him in ways he cannot comprehend. His solace in the rhythms of farm life—its hard work, its quiet joys—cannot erase what has happened, nor the secret he keeps close: his love for a friend implicated in a murder that shattered his rural community. Among Black’s unforgettable creations, Larkin stands as both burdened and transcendent, a figure who lingers in the reader’s mind, refusing to be forgotten. This is a story of reckoning, remembrance, and the fragile hope found among the shadows of the past.

-AnnaLiza Kozma

Journalist and Senior Producer, CBC Radio