Garbo laughs - Elizabeth Hay

Harriet Browning was deprived of movies as a child. When the chance comes, she begins to make up for lost time in a big way. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, this funny and sad-eyed tale tells of a girl who becomes infatuated with the movies. Equally addicted are her three boon companions: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon the quiet backwater where the four friends live, amid the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the jaded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. The pair are the embodiment of harsh reality. And in their wake come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness and sudden death. What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is so much the more attractive option? This brilliant and poignant novel, from the award-winning Canadian writer, Elizabeth Hay, is a seductive comedy of secondhand desire, the lure of the movies and the pleasure and pain of all movie lovers in thrall to the best of life's distractions.