In the winter of 1952, twenty years before she publishes her first novel, just on the brink of a precipitous decline into poverty, and pregnant with her third child, the not-yet-renowned British author Penelope Fitzgerald goes to Fonseca, Mexico, with her young son Valpy at the invitation of two widowed sisters whose silver mine she hopes will be her family's saving grace. Her husband struggles with alcoholism, their literary journal is on the brink, and this is Penelope's last-ditch effort to secure material support. Financial desperation is a moral quandary for Penelope, who reveres the religious and scholarly ascetics that populate her family tree. But she longs to begin her own writing life.
Spare, absorbing ... A welcome diversion from our rage-soaked, polarized culture: a fable with heart and a searching investigation into what makes a marriage endure ... A book brimming with entangled fiction, history, and biography, the unexpected treasures a writer unearths at the convergence of genres. Kane is true to the muse at the center of her novel, highlighting not only Penelope Fitzgerald’s stature and vision but also the necessity of literature in an era of university budget cuts and social-media distractions.
