This is the back-story to Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre, a woman trapped in England after a life in the Caribbean. Rochester is revealed as first immature, then manipulative, greedy and deceitful so that his wife Antoinette is driven into madness. The author Rhys’ story is also fascinating.
Category: Female author
The Lost Garden – Helen Humphreys
Helen Humphreys also wrote Nocturne which I recommended last month. Humphreys is a poet, so this is a short novel (set in 1941 England) with exquisitely chosen words. A lost garden is a metaphor for life and more specifically for love: longing, faith and loss. A beautiful book.
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night – Heather O’Neill
Wonderful storytelling of the remarkable relationship between two siblings, Nouschka and Nicolas, who have grown up without parental love: a physically absent mother and an emotionally absent father. O’Neill captures the francophone world on Montreal in 1995, leading up to the separation vote. The sibling relationship is amazingly close but they are moving in different directions: Nouschka is going forward and Nicolas is stuck in the present/past. Wonderful writing, especially the metaphors!
Flora – Gail Godwin
A 10-year-old (Helen) and a 22-year-old (Flora, a cousin of Helen’s dead mother), spend part of the summer of 1945 together. Helen’s father is working at Oak Ridge on bomb development so Flora is a companion/chaperone. Helen is a precocious, petulant, self-absorbed and incredibly manipulative kid, so interesting character and the ending to the book is a surprise.
All My Puny Stories – Miriam Toews
This is a book about suicide and so it is hard to be perfectly objective but – this is her best book since A Complicated Kindness. Some back story: Toews wrote Swing Low, a non-fiction account of the suicidal death of her father. In AMPS (words taken from a Coleridge poem), the story is fiction but heavily influenced by the suicidal death of Toews’ sister in 2010.
Now for the comments: this is a heart-breaking story, that captures perfectly the inherent conflict between two sisters who love each other, but conflict because one wants to die and the other who wants her sister to live. The inevitability of the progression to the suicide is frightening, despite great efforts by many individuals in addition to the sisters. And finally, the picture of the psych staff is unflattering: indifference and ineffectiveness. Save up your energy for this but it is brilliant writing.
Perfect – Rachel Joyce
A brilliant story: sad, poignant, about fragility and uncertain realities, and the unsettling grip of mental illness. This book is even better than her previousbook The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Under The Wide And Starry Sky – Nancy Horan
A story of the complicated, often tempestuous relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny. The setting is constantly changing in the search for a climate that is healthy, a search that eventually leads to Samoa. (Horan wrote Loving Frank which is also excellent)
Hidden – Catherine Mckenzie
A 3-way story: a man who dies accidentally, his wife, and the woman he was having an affair with. It is not so much a story of infidelity but what secrets need to be hidden.
Accusation by Catherine Bush
A story of how an accusation can take on a life of its own, and have consequences that have little to do with truth. The ending is very satisfying because it is ambiguous.
What David Read 