No Crystal Stair is an absorbing novel that explores an increasingly difficult contemporary reality: functioning as though White while surviving as Black. Marion Willow, a proud young widow, must work at two jobs to ensure that her three girls develop lifestyles not hindered by class and colour. The bitter-sweet experience of Marion's elegant American expatriate neighbour. Torrie Delacourt, could help the girls survive Canada's subtle racism, which, though not legislated, wounds and hems them in. But the women's rivalry for the love of Edmund Thompson, a handsome railway porter, pits them against one another. With humour and sensitivity, No Crystal Stair reveals both the conflict and the human heart of the proud, tightly knit Black community of the Little Burgundy district of Quebec in the mid-forties. It recaptures the days when Montreal was a cosmopolitan hub. It was a city inhabited by jazz musicians, cafe society, artists, gangsters -- those whose world revolved around Rockhead's Paradise--and others who clung to the community church at the end of prohibition, the depression, and the anxious year of World War II.
