Her Name Was Clara

A Prince Edward Island Novel of Sisters and Silence

On the far edge of Prince Edward Island, where poverty is treated like weather and silence passes for good manners, Ruth Blake finds an old wool sweater at the back of her shed and breaks a family rule: she says her sister’s name.

Maggie was “sent away” in the 1970s and never spoken of again. The town accepted it. The house learned how to close itself around absence. Photographs disappeared from the mantel. In 1989, with the sweater laid across a chair and a lifetime of questions held carefully in her throat, Ruth begins to look. She writes letters. She asks. She waits. What comes back are sealed files, altered names, polite explanations that lead nowhere, and the steady sense that the truth has been filed into something unrecognizable.

Threaded across decades, Her Name Was Clara follows a sister who refuses to let paperwork be the final authority on a life. Where official records erase and rearrange, memory persists in quieter ways: a red stitch hidden in the hem of a baby gown, a name spoken once and held, a seam that remembers when the ledgers do not.

Set in rural Prince Edward Island, this is a novel about what happens after the damage is done, and how people carry what cannot be repaired, how households absorb loss without ceremony, and how love survives without answers. Spare and unsentimental, Her Name Was Clara is an act of witness for those who know that life moves on, even when something essential has been left behind.