This is a companion novel to Rachel Joyce’s earlier book The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. In that novel Queenie Hennessy had sent a letter to Harold Fry, a former colleague, telling him she was dying and would like to see him. Somewhat to her surprise he replied that he would walk from his home in Kingsbridge, South Devon, to her hospice in the north of England at Berwick-on-Tweed. He stressed that she should wait for him.

This book, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, is Queenie waiting for Harold. While she waits, Queenie tells the reader her own story: her bad marriage, the loss of a child, and her job in the same brewery as Harold Fry. Although Harold was married and had a son when she knew him, Queenie still fell in love with him but kept it a secret and eventually left her job at the brewery to make a new life in the north of England. In this book she undertakes to tell Harold the truth before he gets to her bedside. It is a touching and harrowing tale, but just as moving as the story of Harold’s own pilgrimage.

Rachel Joyce has won awards for her books as well as original plays and classic adaptations for BBC Radio 4.  She lives with her family in Gloucestershire, England.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This Alice Munro short story collection is a gift at any time. Family Furnishings contains twenty-four of Munro’s short stories, gathered from the last two decades, and is a companion volume to Selected Stories (l968-l994). It has some famous stories, such as The Bear came over the Mountain, whose last sentence is worth the whole book, and which was made into the major feature film Away from Her.

Munro often writes about the people she knew in her Southwestern Ontario hometown, but her books cover the fullness of human experience and so we travel with her over the whole world. One of these stories, Too Much Happiness, gives the life of the noted nineteenth-century mathematician, Sophia Kovalevsky, where romantic love enters the picture in an unexpected way to show just who is in control.

Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 20l3. She had been one of Canada’s favorite writers for decades before this, winning many awards including two Giller Prizes, three Governor General Awards, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker International Prize. Her collections have been published around the world in many languages.   Canada can certainly be proud of her latest achievement. But mostly we have always loved her writing for the way she shows our own country. This collection is one of the best.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a writer, writing a novel about another writer’s life. In Arctic Summer Damon Galgut tells the story of E.M. Forster, how he became interested in India and how his beloved book A Passage to India gradually took shape.

Galgut describes Forster’s own personal life, an only child who lost his father when he was just two years old, lived closely with his mother until he went to Cambridge, later tutored a young Indian who was going up to Oxford, and finally made the trip to India to see his young friend.  Forster, or Morgan as he is called here, slowly came to recognize his homosexuality and the difficulty he had in making close relationships. While he constantly sought affection, desire or lust interfered and he was left unfulfilled. The British reticence among his mother’s friends didn’t help although there are interesting sections on some famous authors he got to know, e.g. Virginia and Leonard Woolf and D.H. Lawrence.

Forster made a second, longer trip to India and there are lovely sections describing life in that country. He did find happiness, although the mystery of India remained with him. Slowly but surely the script of A Passage to India developed and became a book.

Galgut has won international prizes for his books, In a Strange Room and The Good Doctor. He lives in Capetown, South Africa, a city populated by people of all different races and creeds, which is apparent in a book like this one.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

If you’re already a fan of Alexander McCall Smith’s novels, you’ll realize it’s hard to find new ways to praise this “prolific, popular and wonderfully peculiar writer”.  But you’ll be pleased by the newest addition to perhaps his most popular series,  The No. l Ladies Detective Agency.

Entitled The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Cafe, this novel takes us to Botswana where McCall Smith was once a professor of law at the University. He also grew up in the country now known as Zimbabwe. Although he has been living for many years in Edinburgh, he has never forgotten his love for the people of Africa, for their culture and their kindness.

Precious Ramotse runs the No. l Ladies Detective Agency. She is married to the owner of the Garage, a business right next door to their home. She also has an assistant who has been promoted from secretary and is now planning on opening her own de luxe cafe. This group is brought a professional problem to solve, i.e. a woman who has lost her memory and cannot sort out her life. Precious shows her gentle wisdom and shrewd kindness and the story is captivating from every angle.

Review by Anne McDougall

In the rapidly changing world we now live in, M.G. Vassanji’s whole life is an example of these changes.  He happens to be a writing genius and so we can share in his  amazing experiences in more than one “home”.  In his newest book, he concentrates on a part of the city of Dar es Salaam where he grew up as a boy and revisits because he still loves the area.

Vassanji’s people came from Gujarat, India.  Two generations before he was born, they crossed the Indian Ocean to settle in East Africa.  He was born in Kenya but grew up in Tanzania.   He gives an affectionate description of the Indian section of Dar es Salaam called Kariakoo which was full of Indian traders setting up business with  their African neighbours.    These Africans had a close family life, full of music and community celebrations.   Vassanji’s own life took him abroad to study in the United States and eventually settle in Toronto where he know him from his prize-winning stories and novels.

This book gives a good description of some of the highlights of Dar es Salaam’s history, i.e. some of the story of Stanley and Livingstone;  the troubling years of German missionaries in German East Africa;  the revolutions of l964 when Kenya and Tanzania, as well as the island of Zanzibar gained independence from Great Britain only to suffer later from socialist austerity.  But Vassanji remembers another whole aspect of Africa and is saddened when he reads only bad news from that continent.   His memories are of a joyful land and this book goes a long way to show that.

Review by Anne McDougall