Madame Zee

by Pearl Luke

It starts with a strange tightness in her chest, followed by a vision. A boy she doesn’t recognize. A man falling through ice. And finally the serene face of Honora, her dead sister. Mabel doesn’t know why she has these "daydreams." As a young English girl at the dawn of the 20th century, all Mabel knows is that she desperately wants to understand these powerful, shameful episodes that make her so different.
Immigrating to Canada, Mabel tries to cover her secret life with a veneer of normalcy, yet she is propelled into confronting her gift. She becomes Madame Zee, disciple and lover to Brother XII, a charismatic Spiritualist cult leader installed in a Utopian colony on the verdant eastern shores of Vancouver Island. Then, in one shattering moment, Mabel must choose between her dream of understanding and the reality of truth.

(From Publisher)

PEARL LUKE has an M.A. in English Literature from the University of Calgary. Burning Ground, her first novel, won the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Caribbean and Canada Region) and was a finalist for the Georges Bugnet Award, the Chapters/Robertson Davies First Novel Award and the Libris Award. She became interested in Brother XII and his mistress, Mabel Rowbotham (Madame Zee), after watching a documentary about their extraordinary lives. Pearl Luke lives on Saltspring Island.