Patricia Blondal's reputation rests on a single frenzied yet lyrically perceptive novel, and on the stark irony of her death. She is reported to have written A Candle to Light the Sun (1960) in three months, driven to complete the novel before cancer could kill her. She died in November 1959, two months after McClelland and Stewart agreed to publish the novel but several months before the novel appeared. The novel was greeted with an unusual amount of publicity and praise, but, probably because of the reviewers' emphasis on the novels that would never be written, A Candle to Light the Sun was soon forgotten. Even its 1976 replication in the New Canadian Library, when a commentator for Books in Canada called it "dazzlingly brilliant," did little to renew interest.

A Candle to Light the Sun makes an intricate study of the society of Mouse Bluffs, a small prairie town. As...