"Duet," a vivid and comic account of a stubbornly unromantic romance, is the story of Carman, a retired Toronto policeman, who takes to wandering in the wake of his wife's death. On a whim, he rents a cottage north of Kingston from Norma, the cantankerous proprietor of a rural junk-shop. Sex and death haunt the undergrowth as Carman and Norma grumble and feud, and against the grain of their bad temper begin to create a precarious friendship. "Duet" is a beautiful novella, but one without prettiness; David Helwig demonstrates a subtle sense of humanity through his creation of two of the prickliest customers in Canadian fiction.