This book of poetry brings you the journey of a life lived in turbulent times. Its many stories are distilled from personal experience, honed and deepened into the shape and rhythm of poetry. The arc of this life begins with the child who has no fear of bombs -- war being the only way of life she has known -- but is afraid that she might reveal a dangerous secret. Or get a hole in her stocking. Or maybe get served her own pet bunny in a stew. The journey continues through years of dislocations, when the struggle to keep afloat is all -- when the quest is survival of a recognizable self. And sooner or later in anyone's life there's a choice which has to be made: to attain and then sink into comfort, or to continue the journey, seeking freedom from the strands trailing out of the dark distant past, binding and confining, seeking what joy there is in life, on the path of becoming an Elder.

The author Lilly Barnes fictional character is based on her own mother, a concert pianist in the Ural mountains of the Soviet Union, the city of Beresniki. Her German father, a mining engineer, was there on contract building mines. The novel Mara touches on the authors experience through Europe and immigration to Canada. Although the story is fictional it touches on the experience of immigrants and a point of view that is unique to the author but not unfamiliar to many living in Canada today.

Lilly Barnes was born in Russia, studied at the University of Toronto and the University of Vienna, and worked for many years as an arts journalist and scriptwriter for CBC Radio and Television, including, for its entire run, the "Mr. Dressup" show. Mara is her first novel.

Lilly Barnes' profile page

"In Lilly Barnes' Journey, the poet's mantra becomes a mantra for living - a call to experience and marvel at the world through our senses, to listen attentively to the "dancing tree" and the "talkative bird," to "[cull] the countryside for stars" and in so doing, to fulfill our hearts "moaning to expand." Breaking from and weaving in her jarring past, Barnes invites us to leave behind "like outworn skin/ all the fears" we hold as we "huddle in caves" and instead to "ride the blood stream of life," intrigued by the "fragrance of mystery" and open to the joy of what we discover." --Carol Lipszyc, author of Singing Me Home and The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories