A mysterious phone call leads to a clandestine meeting with a stranger. It changed Mona and her daughters' lives forever. Mona should have sensed something was different about her husband's family. They owned the largest waste collection business in New England, but it was the other businesses they were involved in that she didn't pay attention to. When her father-in-law was gunned down outside a restaurant, she learned the whole truth but still made no changes in her life. She learned through a stranger that her husband was dead. With new identities, she was told to take her children and run for their lives. Only the strong resolve of a mother protecting her children could survive this situation. Arriving in a small northern Michigan town was the first of many challenges for the family.…
"There’s no getting away from it: the story of Stephen (Malusi) Mzamane is difficult. Found starving in the South African scrub, he and his brother Mzamo are adopted by the Anglican missionary establishment and trained for the missionary life themselves. Blighted hopes and wrenching loyalties follow as both, in different ways, are ensnared in and betrayed by prejudices hard-wired into the Anglican church of the late eighteenth century. In the hands of a careless writer, A Sin of Omission might have been an impossible read, but Marguerite Poland’s restraint, whilst not sparing us, beckons us on. We trust her, and when you trust an author, you enjoy being absorbed into the world being offered, whatever the delights or otherwise of that world itself. And so, though sorrowing for Stephen, we can enjoy Unity Wills, a woman called to be a soldier of Christ yet only a “Sunday worshipper in her best bonnet”; Mfundisi Turvey, who has learned Xhosa “and not only in the imperative”; and most of all, enjoy being swept from the Donsa bush to Shropshire, from Grahamstown to Canterbury in prose that rings like a bell—subtle, bold, unafraid. I personally was drawn to historical fiction because in my family, history was always more ‘story’ than ‘history’. Not much difference was made between ‘then’ and ‘now’. But there is a difference between then and now. I find it fascinating, for example, that during this Covid-19 outbreak, boredom is as prevalent as fear. Was it the same during the plague? I don’t think so. And then today, dying is deemed the worst thing that can happen to you, even though until perhaps the nineteenth century, the worst thing was to die unshriven. Yet at the same time, stories set in the past offer that essential commodity, hope, history by definition being an account of things that have come and gone. An excellent time, then, to turn to historical fiction. But if you’re fed up of being exhorted to read, here’s something just to ponder: 200 years from now, how will the story of the 2020 pandemic be told? Would we recognise ourselves, or would we be saying, ‘You think that’s how it was? Well, let me tell you . . .’"
The Best Historical Fiction: The 2020 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist ·
fivebooks.com
