Vibrant and illuminating, All Times Have Been Modern tells the story of an education of the heart that becomes an education in the world. After Kay marries Alexander Oleski, a Polish émigré she meets the summer she turns twenty, she travels to Europe and writes a slim novel, igniting grand dreams for herself as a writer. But fallow years follow. When her marriage comes to an end in the 1980s, she decides to move to Montreal and dedicate herself to writing. But in Montreal the life she has planned for herself is interrupted when she falls in love with an architect. Liberating, unpredictable, All Times Have Been Modern is a virtuoso novel that explores the confounding ways that life and fiction collide and overlap. It also raises unsettling questions about the conflicts between love and identity, intimacy and solitude, emotional intensity and what endures.

"All Times Have Been Modern is a brilliant novel...Harvor's style is completely her own and makes her one of the most eloquent and entertaining writers in Canada today."
—National Post

"Tenderness, hopelessness, passion and opportunity move this story...In her fluid style, Harvor reveals that nothing is as it seems, and the most experienced of souls are often the most innocent...[She] draws life from the page, life that continues even after the book closes. You can't help but wonder how Kay is doing now..."
—The Globe and Mail

"In All Times Have Been Modern, Elisabeth Harvor moves through time and space with the ease of a trapeze artist...[She] reveals in her precise, poetic prose how art, like life and love, is all about process."
—NOW magazine

"All Times Have Been Modern overflows with vivid details that linger long after you have finished reading them; you can recall Harvor's images with such clarity that it's almost as if they've become part of your own lived experience."
—Books in Canada