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The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett

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Like Patchett’s previous novel Commonwealth, this is a story about the effects of a divorce, bonds between siblings, and coming to terms with the past.

Maeve and Danny Conroy are the siblings, whose mother Elna left  when they were 10 and 3 to help the poor in India. Danny is the narrator, so all he knows is the story he was told: that she hated her life in the Dutch House, partly because it was a fabulous and gaudy mansion with a pool and landscapes grounds, and partly because her husband, real estate developer and landlord Cyril Conroy, bought it as a surprise for her in 1946, at a time when Elna thought they were dirt poor.

The house came fully furnished, with a servant named Fiona, quickly nicknamed Fluffy and joined by two sisters Jocelyn and Sandy. These three women are the ones to raise the children after their mother left, until Fluffy is dismissed for striking Danny. In many ways Maeve took over as Danny’s mother, cementing a lifelong bond between them. Then Cyril marries a young fortune-hunter named Andrea who comes with two little daughters.

Such is the setup, with the wicked stepmother taking over the house and gradually forcing Danny and Maeve out. One of the most poignant scenes for me centered on Maeve’s room, the nicest bedroom according to Danny, with a window seat overlooking the back garden. Patchett gives just enough detail for the reader to make the room her own and grieve with Maeve when she leaves it.

Patchett’s use of detail also works well in summoning a vision of the Dutch House: certain ornaments, some furniture on the landing, a ceiling, a ballroom on the third floor. This pastiche gives the reader a framework for envisioning the place and remembering what takes place there. The portrait of Maeve (shown on the cover of the book) gathers layers of meaning as we go through the story.

Much of the middle of the book dragged, as we learn about Danny’s life after leaving the Dutch House, his marriage and children, his work. Danny is not very emotionally aware, which sometimes made me wish Maeve were narrating the book. She’s a far more interesting character.

When the two are together, Danny visiting her in Pennsylvania, they park across the street from the Dutch House to talk about the past. In a burst of insight Danny says, “like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father.”

Sandy says it best, explaining why she returns to the house near the end: “The ghosts are what I come for.”

I wanted to like this book. I’m a sucker for stories about lost paradises and enchanted houses (let me tell you about mine . . . ). What I liked best about it was Tom Hanks as narrator. His distinctive voice, reassuring and trustworthy carried me over the somewhat boring stretches and the underdeveloped secondary characters.

Thinking of it as a fairy tale helped me over the unlikely plot points. As Danny notes, how does a man who doesn’t even own a char buy a mansion? Not to mention Elna leaving to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta only a few years after the nun founded the Missionaries of Charity. And the wicked stepmother.

Patchett is an accomplished writer, so I trust that sentence by sentence the writing is good, even without Tom Hanks bringing it to life. The book has received a lot of praise and many good reviews. I’m not sure I would have finished it if I’d been reading a print book, but I’m glad I made it to the end. There’s the painting on the cover, the still somewhat mysterious and contradictory Maeve, and the lost paradise.

What story about motherless children who are also poor little rich kids have you read?

The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware

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On a damp, chilly night, Harriet “Hal” Westaway finally makes it home to her dismal flat. At 21, she’s been scraping out a living doing tarot readings in a kiosk on Brighton Pier she inherited from her mother. In her mail, mixed in with the past-due notices are two letters: a threat from a loan shark demanding immediate payment and one from a lawyer in Cornwall.

The lawyer’s letter informs her of the death of her maternal grandmother and invites her, as a beneficiary, to a reading of the will. Hal knows her mother’s mother died years ago, so this must be a case of mistaken identity. She’s alone in the world, her mother killed in a hit-and-run three years earlier and her father dead when she was too young to remember him.

Still, the promise of a sizeable bequest and the increasing violence of the loan shark’s threats combine to overcome her scruples at deceiving this mourning family. After all, she reasons, they are obviously rich enough to spare a few thousand pounds. In crafting her tarot readings, she’s become superbly skilled at reading people, so she just might be able to pull it off.

She barely manages the one-way fare to Cornwall, where she’s met and taken in the pouring rain to Mrs. Westaway’s funeral at a church outside Penzance, where she meets her “uncles” and is taken back to Trepassen House, a gloomy mansion complete with hostile housekeeper who shows her to a tiny room set off from the rest of the house with a small iron bed and bars on the window.

There was a lock on the door. Two, in fact. They were long, thick bolts, top and bottom.

But they were on the outside.

I generally avoid thrillers—the world is producing a more than sufficient supply of anxiety these days, thank you very much—but I keep gravitating to Ware’s books anyway. This is the first one I’ve managed to read through, entranced by the echoes of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and the brilliant use of tarot cards.

Hal and her mother never believed in the cards; they were a means of making a living.

The cards tell you nothing you don’t already know. It was her mother’s voice, steady in her ear. They have no power, remember that. They can’t reveal any secrets or dictate the future. All they can do is show you what you already know.

Yet the author tantalises us with one card or another, turned up in a reading demanded by her new “relatives” or left conspicuously out, its meaning exerting power over the other characters and perhaps holding a clue to the mystery.

I’m also not a fan of the glut of woman-in-danger stories, but here the gothic atmosphere combined with the fascinating house and its grounds made for a captivating read. And Hal is an interesting heroine. I liked her integrity and how it is put to the test, not just once but over and over. At times I wished she were more strong-minded, but I could also see how the tragedies in her life could have left her afraid and uncertain.

As an author I was intrigued by the pacing and the reveals: when information is revealed, questions answered or new questions raised. Some things I did see coming, so I especially liked the times (no spoilers!) when I expected something to happen and was all set to condemn it as predictable—and it didn’t. Or it happened in a different way. Nice.

A contemporary gothic mystery with a mysterious mansion in Cornwall and plenty of family secrets to unearth: who could ask for anything more?

What mystery have you read that is set in Cornwall?

Family Lore, by Elizabeth Acevedo

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Seventy-year-old Flor decides to throw herself a living wake, alarming her three sisters because they know Flor has a special gift: she can predict when someone will die. They, too, have special gifts: Pastora can tell whether or not someone is telling the truth, and Camila, the youngest, creates herbal tonics and medicines that always heal.

The occasional narrator, Flor’s daughter Ona, has a magical vagina, and Pastora’s daughter Yadi has a mystical relationship with limes. The oldest of the four sisters, Matilde, doesn’t have a magical gift, but her salsa moves are beyond brilliant, and she loves deeply and loyally.

The first adult book by children’s author Acevedo weaves together the stories of these six women with a sure touch. This enchanted tale moves between New York and Santa Domingo, slipping through time, interleaving English with bits of Spanish. The Spanish was not a problem for me, though I don’t speak the language, because the context clues were sufficient.

Reminding me of early Isabelle Allende, like The House of Spirits, the novel delivers a feast. Little by little, Acevedo fills in the lives of these women, their care for each other tugging against their push for independence.

Normally I struggle with multiple narrators and time jumps, but here I didn’t have any trouble keeping the characters and timelines straight. However I did look back at the list of characters at the front of the book for about the first quarter of the book, which I wouldn’t have been able to do if I’d be listening to the audiobook. Also, I wouldn’t have had the formatting that signaled time jumps, so I might have gotten confused

Some of the members of my book club did indeed find the book confusing. They also struggled to get into the characters, perhaps because of the difficulty of tracking so many characters.

One member of my book club noted that she was surprised by what the sisters didn’t know about each other, but secrets within a family are not that uncommon. And actually for a couple of us, seeing the minute changes in their relationships was part of what we enjoyed about the book.

I found the writing joyous and fresh. For example, introducing the story of Flor and her husband: “Pedro had approached her like a strong breeze through an open doorway, unexpected, soft on the skin even if it did scatter a few things to the ground.” 318

When the sisters turn to Yadi, Pastora’s daughter, to look up information on the internet: “The younger generation brought new ways of doing things, these new inventions, and the hermanas touched their fingers to gadgets, or their tongues to new words, and sewed the technology into the fabric of their lives the way one embroiders lace.” 274

I was also intrigued by the way the women went back and forth between New York and Santa Domingo, each city giving them something the other couldn’t. So different from the usual emigrant narrative of longing to return home and not being able to, or of not wanting to return ever. I also saw this in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Discussing this idea sent my book club into the history of the Dominican Republic to look at political changes in that country and whether they related to the waves of immigration.

The relationship between these women—and they with their men—are nothing like what I’ve experienced. Well, now I have, thanks to Acevedo. If you want to understand what a family can be, this is the book for you.

Sisters, sisters! What novel can you recommend about sisters?

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

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Chung’s debut memoir explores several important themes. Her parents—Korean shopkeepers with two daughters already—were warned that the premature baby might not live and if she did, was likely to have expensive disabilities. They decided to offer her up for adoption, and a white couple who badly wanted children brought her home to Portland, Oregon.

She accepted the story her new parents told her, of the selflessness of her birth parents and that adoption had been the best thing for her. Her religious parents told her that she was a “divinely ordered” gift from God. However, they did not see the racist bullying that Chung encountered in Portland, one of the least racially diverse places in the U.S. Their parents’ colorblind insistence that they didn’t think of her as Asian also meant that she did not learn about Korean culture or language.

“Sometimes the adoption — the abandonment, as I could not help but think of it when I was very young — upset me more; sometimes my differences did; but mostly, it was both at once, race and adoption, linked parts of my identity that set me apart from everyone else in my orbit. I could neither change nor deny these facts, so I worked to reconcile myself to them.”

It was only as an adult, pregnant with her first child, that Chung began to question the legend and to begin discreetly searching for her birth parents. “It was time to lay down the burden of being ‘the good adoptee,’ the grateful little girl who’d been lost and then found.” At the same time she did not want to hurt the parents she loved and whom she would always call Mom and Dad.

I appreciated Chung’s openness in writing her journey and also her compassion toward all of the people involved. The themes of the search for identity, adoption in general, and interracial adoption in particular are important ones, and Chung provides much insight into one person’s experience of them.

However, I’m surprised by the awards and praise for this book It might have been better as an essay. Yes, it’s a super important topic, but there’s a lot of repetition and the narration is rather dry. She includes few scenes along with some scenelets (short snippets of scenes). Instead, Chung tells us this story, summarising the events and dwelling on her thoughts and emotions rather than showing us what happened.

Chung herself is an editor, first at The Toast magazine and then becoming editor-in-chief of Catapult magazine in 2016, whose book division published this memoir. In her Acknowledgments, she thanks her editor before anyone else, so I remain a bit baffled by the final product.

Still, Chung gets so much right with this book: genuine emotion, vulnerability and loving compassion for the parents who gave her away and those who raised her.

Have you read a book about adoption that made you think more deeply about the issues involved?

Neighbors, by Diane Oliver

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It may seem unfair to read a debut story collection by a 22-year-old woman right on the heels of reading the final short stories written by a Nobel Prize winner. However, Oliver’s work stands up to the comparison. In fact, although Munro’s stories take place in Ontario and Oliver’s mostly in the South, they seemed quite similar.

Both are almost all about women, ordinary women, with piercing insight as to the reality of their lives. While Munro’s works remind me of how confining women’s roles were in the middle of the 20th century, before feminism’s Second Wave, Oliver’s open up the lives of Black women at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement.

In the title story, young Ellie is helping her little brother Tommy get ready for bed. In the morning, the first-grader will be integrating the local school. Oliver captures the nuances of concern and caring and determination of the children as well as the parents. His father says, “‘I keep trying . . . to tell myself that somebody’s got to be the first one and then I just think how quiet he’s been all week.’” In a later story a young woman goes off to college to oblige her parents but inwardly hates being “the Experiment.”

In other stories, parents struggle to care for their children in the Jim Crow South. A few deal with mothers who’ve been left behind by husbands who’ve gone north as part of the Great Migration. One packs her children onto a bus and takes them to meet the father who hasn’t written in months. In response to her daughter’s question, she says, “‘I couldn’t know for sure. … We had to work toward something. Don’t you see? We wouldn’t have ever gotten out if we didn’t work toward something.’”

These stories go beyond the stereotype of the strong Black woman. We see their weaknesses and accommodations. Oliver’s subtle prose shows the self-deception of a rich doctor’s wife and the blank face that a maid turns to her employer. We walk with a young woman as she heads to her first lunch counter sit-in.

So much meaning is packed into each sentence of these stories, each gesture, each bit of dialogue. What is left unsaid rumbles beneath the text, driving the characters down what comes to seem an inevitable road.

Sadly, this brilliant writer died in 1966, only 22 years old. At the time, she’d had four stories published in journals, so was just beginning her career. I’m grateful for this new collection of her work, and so terribly sad that she couldn’t have been with us longer.

These are some of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Is there a short story you’ve read that you’ll never forget?

Dear Life, by Alice Munro

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Having recently reread Munro’s first collection of short stories, I was eager to read this, her last. Much is unchanged: the stories are still mostly set in small towns in rural Ontario; many are about women struggling for agency in a conservative culture; and there’s a lot of leaving and returning home.  

What has changed is the depth, a willingness to take on even darker themes, and even more complex characters. “Pride” and “Corrie” feature characters with physical disabilities, exploring issues of sexuality, gender, and class. In other stories, such as “Amundsen” and “Haven,” men inhabit their male privilege without apology, leaving the women in their lives to piece out a life from whatever’s left.

Some of the stories explore aging: a character beginning to experience the onset of dementia (“In Sight of the Lake”), a couple choosing where to end their lives (“Dolly”). Other stories are from a child’s viewpoint. “Gravel” in particular is interesting because the first-person narrator seems to be telling the story of loss and memory as a child. Only later do we come to understand that this is a grown woman looking back.

Whatever their ages, Munro’s people exhibit what one reviewer called “bravery, steadiness and stoic grace.”

As an author, my biggest takeaway from this collection—and indeed from Munro’s entire oeuvre—is to trust the reader. I’m one of those people who likes to fix things. An engineer in my day job, I’m always on the alert for a solution, so I still struggle to remember to ask a distraught friend if they want potential solutions (with a risk analysis of each) or a listening ear. As a result, I sometimes find myself explaining too much to forestall a complaint of I don’t get it or Why did the character do that?

Munro seems to have no such qualms. Much is left unexplained in these stories, leaving some people disgruntled, as a glance at Goodreads shows. What she’s really doing is leaving openings for us as readers to bring our own experiences to the table. Like white space in a poem, these openings encourage us to engage with the story. They force us to interpret for ourselves the actions and motivations of her characters.

At times she is more direct: “We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do – we do it all the time.”

The story that fascinated me most was “Train,” about a soldier returning from the war who, nearing his destination, jumps off the train and walks away. It reminded me of Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years which begins with the protagonist simply walking away from her family on a Delaware beach, a scene which has stayed with me for 28 years.

“Jumping off the train was supposed to be a cancellation. You roused your body, readied your knees, to enter a different block of air. You looked forward to emptiness. And instead, what did you get? An immediate flock of new surroundings, asking for your attention in a way they never did when you were sitting on the train and just looking out the window. What are you doing here? Where are you going?”

When you walk away from one life, what do you walk into? I imagined him there, holding on for dear life and then letting go.  

The last four pieces are different. She says, “The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last – and the closest – things I have to say about my own life.”

I found them interesting in their own right, seeing the seeds of many stories. As writers, we do take bits of our experience and transform them as only one tessera in the mosaic of a story. We get some hints of her creative process when she describes a neighbour’s house in rural Ontario “… that we would never visit or know and that was to me like a dwarf’s house in a story. But we knew the man who lived there… Roly Grain his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.”

The choice of what four things to write about also intrigued me. They are a reminder that it’s not necessarily the obvious events, like marriage or having a child, that change and shape you. It could be the small, seemingly trivial events that have made you into the person you are. And thus her choice of subject matter over the course of her career comes into focus: the moments that make a life. And thus life itself. “So immense an enchantment.”

If you were to choose four incidents from your early life that most affected who you are today, what would they be?

Radio Free Vermont, by Bill McKibben

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Subtitled A Fable of Resistance, this is the story of radio personality Vern Barclay’s mission to persuade Vermont to secede from the U. S. Seventy-two years old and dismayed by the speed, greed and corruption that have taken over the country, Vern wants to remind Vermonters of all the things they value that are being lost, not just the slower pace of life, but also local food and the strength of community: Vermont’s “free local economy, where neighbors make things for neighbors—and so they actually bother to give them some taste, body, and character.”

He and his accomplices, the young computer specialist Perry Alterson, his pal Sylvia and an Olympic athlete named Trace, come up with various pranks to drive their point home, starting with a protest at the opening of the first Walmart that backfires, spewing raw sewage into the store. Vern also has hosts a podcast that Perry has set up to use over a dial-up connection to foil their pursuers. The podcast’s motto is “Underground, underfoot and underpowered.”

For Vern, this is more of a thought experiment than a serious endorsement of secession. He mostly wants people to wake up and notice that some good things are slipping away. Still, it fits with the push for secession coming from states like Texas and California.

Humor isn’t that easy to write these days. No matter how much you exaggerate what’s happening in this country, reality shocks you by going even farther. Yet McKibben pulls it off. This zany story is full of fun and surprises, but never quite loses touch with the real world, or a possible version of it.

The satire is softened by the characters who are forthright but pleasant, stubborn but polite. I loved seeing a resistance movement that is not only nonviolent but also positive. It’s focused on building a better future, not just tearing everything down, and demonstrating how to take action, in a friendly way of course.

Funny and thought-provoking, I hope this novel from McKibben is the first of many more. It’s a departure from his many nonfiction books, starting with The End of Nature, in form if not in theme, and must have been a hoot to write.

Have you read any of Bill McKibben’s nonfiction books? Try this novel!

The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell

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In my book club’s choice for this month, Lucrezia de’ Medici, third daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso d’Este, step out of Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” and are brought to life by the author of Hamnet.  When her older sister dies suddenly, Lucrezia is forced to take her place in the politically important marriage with Alfonso. Only 16, she is married to him and carried off to Ferrara in 1560. A year later she is dead, rumored to have been poisoned by her husband.

That much is true, though today historians think she died of tuberculosis. O’Farrell expands the story, creating a rich tapestry of the time and a deep dive into a sensitive young woman’s experience. The narrative alternates between the last few months of Lucrezia’s life when Alfonso has removed her from the castello to a remote fortezza, and the fuller story of her life leading up to this ending.

During her childhood in Florence, Lucrezia leads a limited life, confined to the nursery area where she feels different from her many siblings, older and younger. Imaginative and artistic, she has a rich inner life. And she’s a fierce child, pushing against restrictions and yearning to see the tiger her father has had imported for his personal zoo in the lower reaches of the palazzo.

Since we know from the historical note at the beginning that she will die, the suspense that powers the novel—jacked up every time we return to the threatening fortezza—comes from wondering why it must come to that and whether she is able to resist in any way. Even in the other sections, there are hints and warnings, such as her learning about the Trojan War and how Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter Iphigenia after pretending she is to marry Achilles.

O’Farrell’s luscious writing pulled me in. I felt the prick of hairpins in Lucrezia’s hair, the stiff material of her gown. The “sweet, cloying smell” of lilies in her chamber came to me as did the “waterfall of noise” that “crashes down on her” when “[t]he gates creak open” and the glare in her eyes as she steps out of the palazzo where a carriage waits to take her to her wedding.

After the wedding, she and her maid are carried off to a villa in rural Tuscany. “They travel along a wide road, on either side of which are rows and rows of fruit trees—Lucrezia could, for a while, make out branches heavy with the round curves of peaches and perhaps the tear shape of lemons. But now it is too dark to see anything at all.” Meanwhile, Alfonso has been called back to Ferrara to deal with an emergency: his mother and oldest sister refusing to give up the new, forbidden Protestantism.

Some people in my book club considered the portrayal of a noble woman such as Lucrezia objecting to a political marriage to be an anachronism. Marriage at that time was considered a transaction, especially for rulers. Women such as these were raised knowing that marriages would be arranged for them based on political and/or economic benefits. Instead, this story projects modern-day women’s expectations of personal agency and a loving marriage on both Lucrezia and Alfonso’s sister Elisabetta, who is dallying with one of the guards.

Since I’m also reading Phillipa Gregory’s magnificent nonfiction book Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History, I’ve learned that some women did rebel against being subjugated and treated as property, even during this period. Therefore, I didn’t find it hard to believe that, out of all the women in the book who made no complaint about their arranged marriages, there could be a child such as Lucrezia, raised in  isolation and temperamentally different from her siblings, who would find it a terrifying prospect. Nor that Elisabetta, with all the dissension and rebellion within her own family, might give in to the attractions of a handsome guardsman.

I do agree, though, that many—most?—historical novels feature women and sometimes men whose modern sensibilities are at odds with their time period. I assume this is a necessary adjustment to attract the attention of modern readers.

One drawback of being exclusively in Lucrezia’s point of view is that her interest in and understanding of the other characters is limited. Thus, we don’t get to know them very well. I did find Alfonso interesting, with his combination of ruthlessness—necessary for anyone trying to rule in such embattled times—and aesthetic awe of the castrati’s music, not to mention his rare whimsy. I would have liked to know more about Lucrezia’s maid Emilia, too.

The way O’Farrell orchestrates verb tenses captured my attention. Most chapters are in present tense, some, such as the one about the tiger, in past. And there’s even at least two sections in future tense. Usually, as is normal, the past tense is used for memories and flashbacks in present-tense sections, but now and then it is the past perfect. These are not errors, I believe, but a subtle way of capturing the multiple currents of time that swirl around us.

My book club discussed the ending at length. Some found it ambiguous and, indeed, came up with a few different interpretations. I won’t go into that, of course, but would love to hear what you thought of it, if you read the book.

Do you enjoy historical fiction based on the lives of real people? Why or why not?

Vesper Flights, by Helen MacDonald

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The author of the exquisite and deeply moving memoir H Is for Hawk returns with this collection of essays. She compares them to the objects you might find in an 18th-century cabinet of curiosities, a Wunderkammer: objects of many sorts from the natural world whose strangeness and accidental proximity might inspire wonder and perhaps prompt a larger discussion.

Like the best sort of host, MacDonald opens the doors on these wonders and then lets us make of them what we will. There’s no lecturing. Although she is a presence in the book, it is not about her. Instead, her evocative prose bears witness to these marvels, inviting us to experience them ourselves.

The essays range around the world and into varied environments: from fields and forests to volcanos and the Empire State Building. As MacDonald tells us about wild boars, boxing hares, and several sorts of birds, she encourages us to see the natural world as something other than a reflection of ourselves.  “What science does is what I would like more literature to do too: show us that we are living in an exquisitely complicated world that is not all about us. It does not belong to us alone. It never has.” We are introduced to animals and birds as sentient beings in their own right, with their own needs and wants.

Another theme that runs through these essays is the effect of the loss of habitat on these creatures: those we have lost, such as the wood warblers, and the adaptions some have made, such as the peregrine falcons nesting on the decommissioned power chimneys of the Poolbeg Power Station in Ireland.

For much of the 20th century, falcons were celebrated as romantic icons of threatened wilderness. The mountains and waterfall gorges where they chose to nest were sublime sites, where visitors could contemplate nature and meditate on the brevity of human existence. But there’s a romanticism to industrial sites too. The rusting chimneys and broken windows of the Poolbeg site have their own troubling beauty, that of things that have outlasted their use. Falcons haunt landscapes that speak to us of mortality, mountains by virtue of their eternity, industrial ruins by virtue of their reminding us that this too will in time be gone and that we should protect what is here and now.

Although she deplores the idea that the natural world should be preserved because we humans find it useful in lifting our moods or teaching us about ourselves, insisting instead that it has its own right to exist independently of us, she is not averse to showing how we benefit. She says, “At times of difficulty, watching birds ushers you into a different world, where no words need be spoken. And if you were watching urban falcons, this is not a distant world but one alongside you, a place of transient and graceful refuge.”

Among my favorite parts is the titular essay, which is about chimney swifts and their still mysterious ascent. Twice a day, at dusk and dawn, they fly up out of human sight, where “flying so high they can work out exactly where they are, to know what they should do next. They’re quietly, perfectly orienting themselves.” Another thing I learned is that “Unlike other birds, they never descend to the ground.” Now, when I walk in the evening and see the swifts whirling above, her words speak to me: “Swifts are magical in the manner of all things that exist just a little beyond understanding.”

Another, related theme in these essays is loss: the lost paradises of youth, the chestnut and elm trees that once graced our streets, the extinction or near-extinction of many species. This spring I was thrilled to hear a cuckoo while walking in England, where their population has dramatically declined. She says:

Increasingly, knowing your surroundings, recognising the species of animals and plants around you, means opening yourself to constant grief.

And:

Their loss is not about us, even though when that meadow disappeared, part of me disappeared, too, or rather, passed from existence into a memory that even now batters inside my chest. Look, I can’t say to anyone. Look at the beauty here. Look at everything that is. I can only write about what it was.

Yet there is hope here as well, and treasures to embrace. Even her “Eulogy” for her friend Stu is filled with peace and hope along with the sadness, its ending giving me goosebumps just remembering it.

I keep thinking I’ve finished this book, yet find myself coming back again and again to this essay or that one. I love the way she communicates the “qualitative texture of the world” and opens for me some of its wonders.

What essay or book have you read that reminded you of the wonders of the natural world?

The Send-Off, by Wilfred Owen

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Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men’s are, dead.

Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.

So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.

Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.

Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.