“A Year of Marvellous Ways" by Sarah Winman - review

 “A Year of Marvellous Ways” by Sarah Winman:

It is 1947, Marvellous Ways, an 89-year-old woman, who lives alone on the bank of a Cornish creek by the sea, waits for something to arrive because “the image is still incomplete“. And arrive it does, in form of a young man, Francis Drake, recently returned from the war trenches of France. He was on a mission to deliver a last letter to the father of a dying soldier who made him promise to deliver it personally. Somewhere on this mission he got lost and washed up by Marvellous’ caravan. Drake is very much in need of healing and Marvellous, in her age-old wisdom, is the person who can just do that. She takes him in and coaxes him back to life, rejuvenates him with her stories, teaching him how to see the extraordinary in the ordinary, teaches him to be able to marvel again at life. 

Slowly she reveals glimpses of her life, told in beautiful, poetic, magical prose and we also get to know some of Drake’s history. And as the stories unfold they begin a strange, marvellous life of their own which is part reality, part magical realism, part fairy tale, part enchanted past. It is a gentle twist, though of the knob of reality, a gentle kind of magic and I enjoyed the beautiful prose and its slowly weaving and wafting together a remarkable warm, human story of loss, of hardship, of love, life, nature. and hope. The mingling, the mix, of the literal and the metaphorical is quite rewarding if one is willing (as one should when reading literature) to suspend disbelief. It makes a rich textured, atmospheric read, a beautiful poetic tale.

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