fiction

Wives and Daughters, by Elizabeth Gaskell

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In this leisurely Victorian novel, we get a wonderful portrait of domestic life in a rural English town. Gaskell follows Jane Austen’s dictum that “Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.” There is much humor here as well, but unlike Austen’s wit and satire, Gaskell’s compassion gives us well-rounded characters we recognise immediately from our own lives.

We first meet Molly Gibson, motherless daughter of a respected doctor, as a girl of twelve. Quiet, sensitive and loving, Molly’s sheltered upbringing has made her an interesting combination of innocence and perspicacity. As her father’s companion, she has had more leeway in terms of reading material and worldly conversation than most young women of the time.

The story follows her into young adulthood, as she gains a stepmother and stepsister, as well as a deeper connection with several local families. Here is the true charm of the story for me: the careful way the various characters are brushed in, and the depiction of the subtle—and not so subtle—class distinctions in the town.

As a professional, Molly’s father is a step above the genteel families of Hollingford, themselves superior to the servants and working class. A step above him is Squire Hamley, who family has been established on their property since before the Norman Conquest, though the family is in decline at this point. Above them—though Squire Hamley frequently contests this point—are Lord and Lady Cumnor at the Hall who have been there a mere hundred years or so.

As you would expect, there are romantic entanglements for both Molly and her stepsister Cynthia. The two are close from the start despite their different personalities, Cynthia being shallow and selfish compared to Molly. Romance finds other characters, too, especially Squire Hamley’s two sons.

I’m impressed by how much Gaskell works into this novel, while keeping up the narrative pace: not just daily life, class distinctions and the limitations of women’s roles, but also the political tensions between Whigs and Tories, the complications arising from family secrets, and the burgeoning (if often amateur) scientific developments. Charles Darwin was Gaskell’s cousin and perhaps the model for young Roger Hamley. There is also a fascinating thread about the limitations and unintended consequences of innocence and purity.

The last novel by Gaskell, was originally published in serial form in Cornhill Magazine between 1864 and 1866. Gaskell died in 1865 without completing the final bit, so the last section was written by Frederick Greenwood explaining how Gaskell intended the novel to end. Gaskell was also the author of North and South, Cranford, and a biography—the first—of Charlotte Brontë.

Wives and Daughters is a long and leisurely read. The first two-thirds seemed slow to this 21st century reader, but I relaxed into the pace, and was rewarded by a more lively last third. Another benefit of the length is the rich tapestry of rural life in England around 1830.

Do you have a favorite Victorian novel, or one set in that time period?

A Study in Scarlet Women, by Sherry Thomas

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There have been so many takeoffs on the Sherlock Holmes stories that I was wary of one more. However, this series puts a new twist on them by giving the detective’s character—sharp, analytical, unemotional—to a woman.

With such characteristics, Charlotte Holmes does not fit Victorian England’s definition of a proper upper class woman. Her parents are eager to marry her off, which is the last thing she wants. She comes up with a plan to craft a life where she can exercise her remarkable mind without the constraints society puts on women.

However, when that falls through, her backup plan leaves her disowned by her family and a social outcast, until a chance meeting with the remarkable Mrs. Watson opens another possibility. As her family’s social world is rocked by three unlikely deaths, and her father and sister become suspects, it becomes up to Charlotte to find a way to clear them and find the real murderer.

I delighted in the skillful way Thomas has worked in elements of the original canon while staying true to the time period. A woman cannot be a detective, forcing Charlotte and Mrs. Watson to craft a truly inventive workaround. Plus, the characters spring to life—each one unlike what you’d expect, full of flaws and fun and surprising gifts. The mystery itself is engrossing as well.

Usually I avoid novels that use real people or other author’s characters. The former feels invasive and the latter lazy. However, I’m glad I made an exception here. These stories are truly original and a lot of fun. I’ve now read seven in the series and look forward to reading the others.

While I enjoy all the characters and plots, Charlotte herself is what keeps me reading these books. She is a most unusual woman, as you would expect from someone with Sherlock’s personality and gifts. She stands out even more in this time period—the first book takes place in 1886—when women’s roles were much more constrained than now. I enjoy seeing how she handles ever more difficult situations.

If you’re looking for a new mystery series to entertain you while the cold weather keeps you inside, give this book a try.

What mystery series are you enjoying these days?

The Romantic, by William Boyd

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An unusual novel, my book club’s pick for this month covers the life of Cashel Greville Ross from his time as a young child in Ireland, through 451 pages of adventures, to his death. Born in December, 1799, Cashel’s 82 years covers most of the 19th century, and his adventures hit most of the touchstones of that period.

For example, when he gets disillusioned as a teenager, drops out of school, and joins the army, he ends up in the Battle of Waterloo. When he travels to Italy, he becomes friends with Byron and the Shelley ménage. This is a picaresque novel, like Don Quixote, where each chapter is almost a stand-alone story, with a new challenge for the protagonist and a new setting.

It’s great fun, seeing where a new chapter will take Cashel as he travels the world in pursuit of his next great scheme for living. Should he be a lover, an explorer, a writer, a farmer? This question of how to live your best life is far older than Oprah or Mary Oliver. Montaigne’s Essays are primarily multiple attempts to answer it.

The change of scene and story in each chapter becomes a huge challenge for a writer, which Boyd rises to brilliantly. He must have done a tremendous amount of research in order to create a new world in each chapter, full of a stunning amount of period detail. Also, since Cashel’s adventures are often tied to real events and people, each one had to be meticulously studied.

What ties it together, besides the dazzling writing and Cashel himself, is the theme named in the title. The question at the heart of the Romantic Movement in the 19th century is whether we should value our feelings over our rational thoughts. Which should prevail as we make large and small decisions? The Romantics plumped for the former, in reaction to the previous century’s Enlightenment, which prized science, facts, and logic above emotions. Thus, Cashel often allows his emotions to dictate his actions, with mixed consequences.

This theme of feelings versus logic is of interest to me. Of course, nothing could be more relevant to our society’s current discord between those who believe a statement is true because they feel like it is and those who look for facts and proof and logic to support it. Over the course of my own long life, I’ve also considered this theme, and questioned how much one or the other influenced my own decisions.

While I did enjoy—and admire!—the story, I have to admit that I eventually tired of the identical pattern for each chapter—Cashel succeeds brilliantly, then crashes for some reason or other, at which point another opportunity presents itself, which becomes the adventure of the next chapter. The idea that one person could be so amazingly proficient in every sphere is unlikely, which undermined what’s been called the dream of the story, pulling me out of it.

So why did I listen to this lengthy novel, not once, but twice? Because I was entranced by the narrator Kobna Holbrook-Smith. His voice is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I’d be happy to listen to him read anything, however boring the content. Here, though, his dramatic talents are on display, bringing the story and each character to life. I might be happy to listen to this story many more times, until I can find something else he’s narrated.

By listening to this book, I apparently missed out on some of the ancillary materials: footnotes, maps, etc. In this case, it was a trade-off I was happy to make. It’s not the first time this has happened with an audiobook. Since I love maps, perhaps in the future, I’ll look to see what’s included with a book before choosing the audio version.

What “whole-life” novel have you read?

Best Books I Read in 2023

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2023. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life as a purveyor of wood and coal. Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. Then comes a book like this that reminds me of the courage and goodness that can be found.

2. Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe
Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

3. The Years, by Annie Ernaux
Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

4. Horse, by Geraldine Brooks
This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly. Yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

5. Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer
There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away and created our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world. A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

6. A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan
I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work. This, her first novel, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults. It’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

7. Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips
In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him. This is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, and how they are affected by the girls’ disappearance. We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia.

8. Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck
This absorbing historical novel follows two real women, Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it.

9. Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve is given away in payment for his father’s debts. Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

10. The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner
When Zoë is sixteen, her widowed mother unexpectedly marries again and moves to Nice. Zoë decides to stay in their old London flat and enjoy her new-found freedom from her drab life alone with her mother. As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice. With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of Zoë and the people with whom she interacts.

What were the best books you read in 2023?

The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper

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This time of year, when the sun begins to return even though winter is just beginning (in the northern hemisphere), has been celebrated with rituals throughout the centuries. Prehistoric monuments such as Stonehenge, the building of which is believed to have begun around 3100 BCE, identify the precise moment of the winter and summer solstices. They probably had other uses as well; certainly Stonehenge was also a burial site and may be been used for religious ceremonies, a healing site, and/or as an astronomical observatory.

My favorite books about the solstice are The Dark Is Rising sequence, five fantasy novels by Susan Cooper for young adults. The author draws on Arthurian legends, Celtic and Norse mythology, and English folklore to tell the story of the struggle between good and evil.

In keeping with the season, these are identified as the Light and the Dark, which raised no cultural sensitivity concerns when the books were published in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever we might think today of the persistent identification of dark colors with evil, these are still the best terms to describe the turmoil at the time of the winter solstice, when the sun tries to return and the darkness resists.

In these stories Will Stanton discovers that he is one of an ancient mystical people called “Old Ones” who are gifted with magical powers. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his eleventh birthday is the moment when he comes into his powers, including the ability to move through time. He is tasked to find the four Things of Power which the Old Ones need in order to vanquish the Dark.

Cooper’s five books are truly wonderful, especially for someone like me who grew up with these myths and legends. I can still picture that corner of my neighborhood library, just to one side of the front door, that held the books that captured my imagination as a child and put me on the path to become a writer.

The return of the sun inspires us with hope. Whether you are celebrating the winter solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia’s Day, the Lunar New Year, Las Posados, or another festival, I wish you joy, health, love and peace, now and in the coming year.

What are your favorite books of the season, however you celebrate it?

The Music Shop, by Rachel Joyce

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I’ve written before about Joyce’s novels The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and Miss Benson’s Beetle, so I looked forward to reading this, her fourth novel. It was even better than I expected.

In London of 1988, Frank owns a record shop—yes, vinyl only—on a street where the buildings are literally falling apart and the shops all struggling. His superpower is to find the perfect piece of music for whoever comes into his shop. They may know what they want, but he knows what they need.

Frank had helped them through illness, grief, loss of confidence and jobs, as well as the more daily things like football results and the weather. Not that he knew about all those things, but really it was a matter of listening, and he had endless patience.

The other shopkeepers are drawn with respect and compassion. Mr. Novak the baker, Maude the tatooist, Father Anthony selling religious bookmarks and other iconography, the Williams brothers who run a funeral home and are often seen holding hands: they are given to us in their fullness. This is an approach I noted in Joyce’s other books, the way she respects the voice of even the minor characters and her tone. She doesn’t make fun of the characters or look down on them.

The push by a development company to buy out tenants and shop owners alike, in order to tear down all the buildings to make way for luxury apartments, strains the communal bonds of the street whose inhabitants have previously been so supportive of each other.

Then a German woman in a green coat faints outside Frank’s shop. Ilse Brauchmann slowly becomes enmeshed in the community, with her mysterious background and amazing—to Frank at least—ability to fix anything mechanical. Eventually she asks Frank to give her music lessons.

The true joy of the book for me is listening to Frank talk about music. His sensitive descriptions, which have almost nothing to do with music theory and much to do with emotion and theme, have sent me back to pieces I thought I knew well and to others that were new to be. He says:

‘Music comes out of silence and at the end it goes back to it. It’s a journey . . . the silence at the beginning of a piece of music is always different from the silence at the end . . . Because if you listen, the world changes.’

As a writer, I was fascinated by Joyce’s interweaving of all these different strands to make an irresistable tapestry. I also noted the way she teased out the characters’ backgrounds with the same care as Frank layering in the context of a piece of music, and thus providing us with the same kind of insight.

At this time, when so much seems to be wrong with the world, this novel gave me comfort, reminding me of our common humanity and how we find it through our emotions in music, mutual concerns, and each other.

What novel by Rachel Joyce have you read? What did you think of it?

Terrace Story, by Hilary Leichter

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Imagine that you are young and living in a tiny apartment with your spouse. Then there’s a new baby, and it feels like you don’t have room to turn around. The windows look out on other walls, and it’s all so cramped and impossible. Then your friend Stephanie comes to visit, and when she opens a closet door, instead of broom and dustmop, there is a terrace: a large terrace, with a table and chairs and green plants and a gorgeous view.

Whoa, I thought, as dazzled by the idea as the characters are by the sudden sunlight. Impatiently turning the pages, I was terrified that the rest of the story wouldn’t hold up. Reader, it did. It knocked my socks off.

By story I mean the first of the four interlocking stories that make up this book. I don’t want to go into too much detail, and urge you not to read more about the book. Just jump in and let yourself be surprised and saddened and swept away.

Leichter finds imaginative yet concrete ways to get us to think about love and time and space and memory—those ineffable concepts. The book is funny and unsettling, sweet and compelling.

Enough with the adjectives. This may be the shortest review I’ve written, because I don’t know how to write about it or analyse it without giving too much away. I’ll just say that magic happens when the author unleashes her imagination and invites us into the story.

What book have you read recently that knocked your socks off?

The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li

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I’ve been a fan of Yiyun Li’s writing ever since I picked up a copy of her first book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers in Toronto shortly after it was released in 2006. In her latest novel we meet Agnès and Fabienne in 1950s rural France. Only 13, they have already seen a lot of death, not just the war but the death of Agnès’s brother after his return from a German prisoner of war camp and of Fabienne’s older sister in childbirth.

The two are inseparable, linked in one of those intense adolescent friendships—do boys have them too?—that ignore the rest of the world. Fabienne, the leader, boils over with mischievous, sometimes violent games that Agnès eagerly joins. She says, “I gave Fabienne what she wanted: her Agnès. I did not give this Agnès to others, but what they asked of me I did my best to accommodate.”

Agnès says of her friend, “Some people are born with a special kind of crystal instead of a heart . . . That crystal in place of a heart—it makes things happen. To others.” Fabienne yearns for the excitement of the world outside their village while Agnès yearns merely to be with her friend, to live in the world Fabienne creates.

Then Fabienne comes up with a scheme for the two of them to write a book. She dictates her dark stories—an American GI is executed; a young woman suffocates her newborn and leaves it in a pig trough—for Agnès to record in her excellent handwriting. Fabienne decides to drag in the local postmaster, reasoning that as a widower with no friends, he must be lonely and bored.

What happens with the book and how it affects the girls’ friendship follow. As shown in the quote above, the book is narrated by Agnès, but an adult Agnès, married and living in Pennsylvania where she raises geese.

In my writing community, we have been talking some about how to sustain momentum in a story when you have a passive protagonist. One way is to have a mesmerizing voice, which this story certainly has. I kept trying to put it down in order to tackle more of my to-do list, but was unable to stay away.

It’s an unusual voice and an odd story. What I saw in it, and treasured, were the kinds of friendships I remember from my youth, and also the shifting of power within those friendships over the years. I saw the yearning for freedom, and the question of how much freedom is enough.

As I was reading, it seemed a meandering story, but in retrospect it comes together as an astute psychological portrait, a fairy tale, a story of secrets and social pressures. It will not leave me alone.

Have you read anything by Yiyun Li?

The Final Case, by David Guterson

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The unnamed narrator of Guterson’s latest novel is a writer who no longer writes. Like many retirees, he finds that house projects and what my friend calls life maintenance tasks quickly swell to fill up his days. Then his 84-year-old father calls to tell him that two things have happened: a tree has fallen in his yard, and he has had a minor car accident.

The tree is not important but the car is, because Royal is still working as a lawyer and now has no way to get to his office. The narrator agrees to be his chauffeur and quickly becomes caught up in one of his father’s current cases.

This setup for the story had me eager to read more. We have the contrast between the two men, one seemingly determined to continue working till his last day on earth and the other setting aside his career and seemingly not missing it at all. We have the loving relationship between them while navigating the problems of an aging parent: Royal decides that even when the car is fixed he should no longer be driving.

And we have the case. Abeba, a young Ethiopian orphan adopted by a fundamentalist Christian couple has died of abuse. The father was at work during the critical time, so it is the mother who is on trial. When no one wants to defend her, Royal agrees to do it, not because he thinks she is innocent, but because he believes everyone deserves a defender and that having one makes the prosecution present a solid case and makes the court apply the law fairly and accurately.

Beyond all these intriguing elements, we have Guterson’s mesmeric flow of well-wrought sentences that kept me reading past every self-imposed deadline. He captures voices of individual characters beautifully, from the gracious, considered words of the elderly lawyer to the Fox News Entertainment Channel-inspired courtroom rant of the accused’s mother. Guterson also gives the narrator a voice that is quiet, and intelligent, while his openness and emotional depth provide a surprising drive.

On another level, the narrator being a writer brings in questions about the uses of fiction and how to recognise it. He says after telling us right off that he used to write fiction:

If that leaves you wondering about this book—wondering if I’m kidding, or playing a game, or if I’ve wandered into the margins of metafiction or the approximate terrain of autofiction—everything here is real.

The story carries the question of how to distinguish fact from fiction into other realms, the trial testimony, for instance, and even within ourselves.

The fact that people do what they do, or think what they think, or say what they say–it can be so inconsistent with their view of themselves that they deny to themselves that it ever happened. They invent a story for themselves in which they didn’t think or feel or do or say anything wrong, and that story becomes reality for them, so real that they’ll defend it to the bitter end, even when the facts in the real world say otherwise. They play this trick on themselves, because if they don’t, they’ll have to accept that they’re not the good person they thought they were.

Guterson and his wife themselves adopted a child from Ethiopia, and the case in this book is apparently based on a real trial that occurred in 2011 involving another Ethiopian orphan. However, this novel is not a courtroom drama. Well, some of it is. And I felt I knew where I was when the courtroom testimony began. But then Guterson pulls the rug out from under the reader, abandoning the trial itself to accompany the narrator to his sister’s tearoom and other activities. At first this third part of the book seemed to me a jumble of unrelated, if beautifully written, anecdotes. Looking back after finishing the book, though, it came together.

One member of my book club was disturbed by the way the father-son relationship overshadowed the story of the young girl, Abeba. While I understand that was not the book Guterson set out to write, I did feel Abeba was given short shrift in the story, was in fact merely a pawn in the story of the father and son. Maybe that is Guterson’s point, or one of them: that no matter how much our hearts may ache for others, in the end we are the protagonists of our own story. Perhaps this is part of his questioning the uses of fiction.

I recently read an excellent essay by Sallie Tisdale in Harper’s Magazine on memory and memoir that questions the idea of autobiographical memory: that our life experiences link together in a narrative arc, and that they become the basis of our identity.

Perhaps Guterson is exploring some of the same questions. If you, too, find such ideas interesting and are willing to immerse yourself in well-wrought prose, I suggest reading this novel all the way through, and then giving yourself time to ponder your reactions.

What novel have you enjoyed that took you by surprise?

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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There are some authors whose every book is a must-read for me. Tóibín is one, ever since I picked up a battered copy of The Heather Blazing at a used book and tool sale in a market town in England twenty years ago. I persuaded my book club to read it as well and they’ve gone on to enjoy other novels by him. You’ll find several of his books in my blog: Brooklyn, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, The Empty Family, Nora Webster, and The Magician.

Not having been raised Catholic and a longtime feminist, I’ve given little thought to the culture that has built up around Mary, aside from discarding the stereotype of her as docile and obedient that many people hold up as the ideal toward which all women should strive. As a mother, I could feel her horror and grief at the death of her son, but that made me dislike even more the priestly glorification of human sacrifice. Well, I guess they would say half-human.

However, this first-person narrative captured me immediately, giving me a new and completely plausible image of an historical Mary. Here, she is older and alone, living in Ephesus, a city known for its Temple of Artemis, located in what is now Turkey, thus far enough away from Rome to offer safe haven from her Roman pursuers. There, she is visited by two of her son’s disciples who watch and support her even as they question her repeatedly about her son’s life to bolster their own narratives. She says:

They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep . . . They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.

She considers those who followed her son a “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” and judges herself with the same brutal clarity. In this slim novella, she tells us her story, the one she holds in every part of her body.

And it is an utterly credible story. If there truly was an historical Jesus—his name is never mentioned in this book—then this portrait of a happy, playful child grown into a cold and distant man is one I can believe. It is the story of too many men, and a few women, who have embraced the portrait of themselves they see in others’ eyes and the power that comes with it.

It is not the story that has come down to us; that’s the one crafted by his followers, the one she disputes. It is still an enthralling one. A mother, telling us about her son—her son. She discounts the stories she hears about his so-called miracles as exaggerations by the crowd that follows him. Even her glancing acquaintance with the results, such as meeting the undead Lazarus, are ambiguous.

Tóibín has crafted a tender and agonizing book that has changed my view of Mary and her son.

What novel of Colm Tóibín’s have you read? What did you think about it?