Come to the Window

April 22, 2024
Norman follows up The Ghost Clause with a stunning literary mystery set in 1918 Nova Scotia. On the same night a whale washes ashore in the small town of Parrsboro, bigamist Elizabeth Frame murders her second husband in their bed. Reporter Toby Havenshaw is assigned to cover the trial, but he’s more focused on reuniting with his wife, Amelia, a surgeon who’s just returned from the frontlines of WWI. As Elizabeth’s case wears on, Toby documents it in erudite diary entries. Things turn scandalous when Elizabeth and the court reporter, Peter Lear, run away together. As Amelia deals with an outbreak of Spanish flu and Toby records his efforts to track the runaway outlaws in his diary, he draws insights on the shifting world around him from sources as wide-ranging as Heraclitus, Robert Louis Stevenson, and L.M. Montgomery. With sensitive attunement to the grief and uncertainty of the postwar years, Norman constructs an engrossing period piece that speaks to the present moment without losing sight of the engrossing crime at its center. This is humane, original, and easy to devour in a single sitting.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
A tragic love story becomes a journalist's obsession. This novel by Norman, like much of his fiction, is constructed out of a handful of reliable elements. Nova Scotia setting? Check. Quirky protagonist? Check: The narrator, Toby Havenshaw, is a courts-and-cops reporter gathering notes for a book on insomnia. Crime of passion? Check: Toby is covering the trial of a woman, Elizabeth Frame, accused of killing her husband on their wedding night in a seaside hotel. But there are some unique elements, most obviously the whale that has beached on that seaside. And into whose blowhole Elizabeth has tossed the murder weapon. And which is ultimately, spectacularly blown up. Not to mention that Elizabeth is pregnant from a man she was married to before her slain husband--and has run off with a PTSD-struck court stenographer after the explosion. It says something about Norman's command as a novelist that this setup doesn't read as comic, or even particularly absurd--as usual in his work, he conjures up a world where calamity is the norm, and his heroes' roles are to find poise somehow within it. Because the novel is set in 1918, as the Spanish flu begins running rampant through Nova Scotia, it's hard not to read it as a Covid-19 allegory, echoing contemporary paranoia and nativism. "Today...is going to be busy as any day in the Old Testament," one character says, and the novel does create the feeling that epic, tragic, metaphorical events stalk Toby wherever he goes. Yet for all the chaos, Norman has written what is at heart a tender book, sensitive to the surprising nature of relationships, the depths of personal trauma, and the capacity of affection to alleviate the pain. A well-turned story suffused with Norman's trademark melancholy.

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