Interpretations of love A novel

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Campbell's dreary first novel (after the collection Cat Brushing) starts off with a corker of an ethical dilemma before drifting into the meandering musings of a cohort of Oxford-based academics. Retired Old Testament professor Malcolm Miller reflects on a letter his dying sister gave him 50 years earlier, which she asked him to pass on to Joe Bradshaw, the man she believed was the father of her daughter, Agnes, who was four at the time. For whatever reason, Malcolm didn't do so. In the decades since, Joe became a psychoanalyst, and through a remarkable coincidence, took on Agnes as a patient when her marriage was falling apart and developed romantic feelings for her. Now, Agnes's daughter is getting married, and Malcolm and Joe are going to be at the wedding, prompting Malcolm to wonder whether now is the time to share the letter's contents. The novel shifts between the points of view of Malcolm, Joe, and Agnes, but each of their voices sound confusingly similar, and they're all disposed to statements like "Somewhere is the unalterable, irradicable truth and I need not fear it." Only the most patient readers will want to enter the minds of these circular thinkers. Agent: Eleanor Birne, PEW Literary. (Aug.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

DEBUT Campbell, who at 80 years old made waves with the story "Cat-Brushing" and went on to publish a short story collection of the same name, writes her debut novel. An elegant estate on the coast of England serves as the setting for a wedding at which an old letter, newly delivered, will upend the lives of several guests. The narrative shifts between three characters: Agnes, mother of the bride, an academic who was orphaned at an early age when her parents died in a car crash; Joe, a retired psychiatrist, who once treated Agnes for depression during her marriage to an abusive husband; and Malcolm, a dissipated Oxford don, uncle to Agnes, and holder of the letter. The missive in question, written by Agnes's mother shortly before her death, was entrusted to her brother to deliver to Joe, with whom she had had a fateful wartime encounter. The tangled relationships of these three characters will undergo a profound change when the letter's contents are revealed. VERDICT Admirers of Mary Wesley will appreciate this impressive debut by another late -looming writer. From its lovely cover to its character-driven plot, this poignant novel is warmly recommended.--Barbara Love

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A novel about love and loss in the long century after World War II. In 1946, a woman writes a letter to a man with whom she had a romantic encounter after he saved her from a bomb blast during the Blitz in Liverpool five years earlier. She believes that her daughter might be his, though she has married another man and lives a happy life. She asks her brother to send it, but he doesn't, because days later she and her husband are killed in a car accident, leaving their daughter an orphan. Fast-forward 50 years or so, and that daughter, Agnes, is grown up, her own daughter is getting married, and her uncle decides he should give Agnes the letter at his grandniece's wedding. He's read the missive, and he knows that, through a series of uncanny coincidences, Agnes has already met the man who might be her father. Indeed, he has become part of her extended family. This is not a spoiler. These connections are revealed in the first section of the novel, which alternates between the long, leisurely first-person narratives of Agnes' uncle, Agnes herself, and the man who might be her father. The novel's true subject is not will or reason, the engine of many plots, but rather the opposite: the murky unconscious. The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza comes up repeatedly, with all three characters quoting some version of his critique of free will: "If a stone that had been thrown had consciousness it would believe that it had chosen its own trajectory." Each character slowly comes to feel the force of loss, the way the past "tends to leak into the present all the time," and the deep mystery of love and connection. Campbell probes these complicated ideas in clear, shimmering prose, turning the characters' engagement with their psyches into something quite intoxicating. A heady and heart-filled debut novel by an author whose first story collection was published when she was 80. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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