Book review: A Year of Marvellous Ways (Sarah Winman)
Marvellous Ways has lived her life and is living alone in a remote Cornish creek. She’s waiting for something, and even she doesn’t know what it is, but she is convinced it is not simply death.
Drake is a young soldier who has suffered in the Second World War, and he finds himself at the creek through a combination of circumstances and coincidences. It seems that Marvellous, approaching the age of ninety, has one last important task to perform.
A story of love, lost and found, family, heartache, and the feeling of impending grief and death. Sarah Winman’s sometimes poetic prose draws us into the mind of this old lady, Marvellous Ways, into her very soul. This is not a book I would have chosen to read for leisure, but it is on my review list for this month, and I was pleasantly surprised. An unusual story touching on fantasy and the magic of life, not all to be taken literally; but there is an array of metaphors to which most of us can relate. If we have loved, or loved and lost, Winman has tapped into these experiences and related them to the stories of the two main characters.
I haven’t yet read Sarah’s first novel, ‘When God was a Rabbit’, but it’s on my review list for this year.
Michael Braccia