Days of Light
Megan Hunter
Grove Press, 288 pages, $43.50
At her idyllic family pile in the English countryside on Easter Sunday 1938, 19-year-old Ivy not only impatiently awaits the arrival of her beloved older brother Joseph’s fiancée, Frances, but also longs for signs of the beginning of her own independent life. Nobody suspects — including their parents and the cast of colourful bohemian regulars reminiscent of the Bloomsbury Group’s painters and writers — that this evening’s events will alter the course of their lives.
Megan Hunter closely considers six pivotal days over six decades in Ivy’s life, through the shifting lens of her heart’s desire and loss — from the Spanish Civil War to motherhood during the volatility of the Second World War to the stability of a final great love near the end of the 20th century.
Through delicate, precise prose, we witness how actions have lingering consequences over the course of a person’s life, tossed stones perpetually rippling the water, their mysteries finally illumined, if we’re lucky.
Fonseca
Jessica Frances Kane
Penguin Press, 272 pages, $37.99
Through unexpected correspondence from the Delaneys, wealthy elderly sisters-in-law and former owners of a profitable silver mine, writer Penelope Fitzgerald is lured with her six-year-old son Valpy to their doorstep in northern Mexico with the possibility of an inheritance.
The money couldn’t be timelier as the London literary journal Fitzgerald runs with her husband Desmond — an alcoholic struggling with psychological trauma from war service — is verging on bankruptcy despite such celebrated contributors as J.D. Salinger, Dylan Thomas and Muriel Spark.
When the two land on the Day of the Dead in November 1952, they discover that they are among several visitors competing for the life-changing funds. During the time spent in fictional city Fonseca, cameos by painters Edward Hopper and his wife Jo enrich Fitzgerald’s experience of the place, as the tension builds when a stranger claiming to be a Delaney heir arrives.
Interstitial letters written by Fitzgerald’s adult children in 2020 add lustre, clearly supporting Jessica Frances Kane’s narrative; one from daughter Tina notes, “I think the dividing line between fiction and fact is quite blurred in her biographies and her novels, so you push on.”
Enthralling and elegantly written, “Fonseca” is a richly imagined, vibrant portrait of previously unexplored months in Booker Prize-winning novelist Fitzgerald’s life.
The Road to Goderich
Linda McQuaig
Dundurn Press, 368 pages, $23.99
When 15-year-old, rebel-hearted Callandra Buchanan’s father unexpectedly dies in rural Scotland in 1832, to save her widowed mother and younger siblings from destitution, she agrees to wed Norbert Scott, the insipid reverend who conducted her father’s funeral. Reverend Scott, from a wealthy Glasgow family, in return pays the mortgage on the Buchanan farm to allow them to stay.
Soon the reverend’s cruelty to his young wife becomes apparent and the only kindness in Callandra’s life comes from Lottie, a household servant. When Reverend Scott accepts a post as a Presbyterian clergyman in a remote town in Upper Canada, there is more upheaval for Callandra. She travels across the turbulent ocean with him, their young daughter Emma, Lottie and her carpenter brother Sam, first to Toronto and then on a perilous journey to Goderich with a plan to build a new church for the community.
An innocent and unintentional lie is the first among many in a Russian-nesting-doll narrative of lies that propel the plot and unravel lives.
Like Susanna Moodie’s pioneering “Roughing It in the Bush,” about her early years as a settler in Upper Canada, Linda McQuaig’s novel revives 1832 rural Ontario in gutting and glorious detail.
The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter
Peter Orner
Little, Brown and Company, 448 pages, $38
Middle-aged Chicago novelist and literature professor Jed Rosenthal, recently separated from his therapist spouse and co-parenting their young daughter, decides to try to write his way through stacks of research to solve a cold case: the 1963 death of Karyn “Cookie” Kupcinet, a 22-year-old Hollywood starlet found apparently strangled in her apartment days after the Kennedy assassination.
It’s not only a professional quest — after all, he hasn’t published a book in 14 years — but also a personal one. Jed’s grandparents, Babs and Lou, were longtime inseparable best friends with Cookie’s parents, Essie and Irv, and in the aftermath of her death their friendship enigmatically ended.
Archival photos of the real-life Kupcinets as well as excerpts from Irv’s gossipy syndicated columns for the Chicago Sun-Times, from the ’50s through the early ’80s, add autofiction authenticity to this engrossing and witty yarn in which secrets kept and secrets told abound.
