To All Appearances A Lady

In this strangely beautiful, haunting first novel, Canadian poet Bowering sets her hero, half-Chinese boat pilot Robert Lam, adrift on a voyage around Vancouver Island with the ghost or spirit of Lam Fan, his just-deceased 100-year-old stepmother. Their taunting, fiercely loving relationship propels Robert on a reluctant journey of self-discovery. He learns the full story of his mother, idealistic reformer India Thackery, an emigre from Hong Kong who aided lepers on a Canadian island colony and suffered a terrible death. He realizes that India's husband, Robert Louis Haack, a robber and paid informer on Chinese illegal immigrants, was not his real father. In unmasking the surprise of his true paternity, Robert gradually comes to accept himself. The cadenced narative yields its secrets slowly as the action shifts between Canada, China and California, and from the 1890s to the 1950s. In Lam Fan, the ruefully wise matriarch, Bowering has created a magnificent character, at once mythical and human.
— Publishers Weekly

"I found myself rereading sentences, passages, whole pages, slowly consuming the words and the gorgeous details—a bolt of cloth, a whiff of opium smoke, a bit of polished bone. Delicious."
— Renee Hulan, Malahat Review

"...vivid, absorbing, perceptive, sensitive, and spare. To All Appearances a Lady is a marvellous debut; to all appearances a paragon of dazzling imagination."
— Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday

"Bowering synthesizes time past, time present and time-in-coincidence to create a boundless time and a boundless work of art.
— Doug Beardsley, Times Colonist

"Bowering’s novel is a powerful one, with a wealth of colour and a fine sense of drama. It is positively Conradian, not only in its nautical lore but also in its epic sweep.
— Books in Canada.