When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. At times affectingly pained and searching, at others reminiscent of the sweetly benign rural community of All Creatures Great and Small, the novel offers a quiet quest for honesty and connection that, though lacking the simple clarity of its predecessor, still offers emotional insight and a memorably humane vision.Ī painful private journey is traced in a sympathetic yet fragmented tale.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

The central figure of that book, Ellen Parr, takes a major role here too, befriending Acton, offering wisdom and more to the vicar whose beliefs and structures have suddenly turned to dust. The consequences of that schism and Acton’s eventual owning of his shortcomings, as well as Yvette’s secrets, form the intense core of this hard-to-categorize narrative that also serves as a companion to Liardet’s impassioned previous novel-also set in Upton- We Must Be Brave (2019). These voice not only her side of the relationship, but also details of the miscarriage of their first child, an event which created a vast schism in Acton’s life. Liardet’s new novel moves back and forth in time, grounded in the present by the now long-widowed Acton, who's taking on a new parish in Upton, but interspersed with commentary by Yvette, drawn from her notebooks. Shot down on a mission, then a prisoner of war, he suffered yet survived, marrying Yvette and becoming a vicar in the south of England. Modest and decent, he’s an upright figure-a pilot in the Royal Air Force who met his future wife, Yvette Haddad, while stationed in North Africa. James Acton might be a member of the great generation who offered themselves up to fight in the Second World War, but he would be the last to say so.

A widowed English vicar is forced to face the truth about himself, his marriage, and his faith when his home literally and figuratively falls to pieces.

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