![]() ![]() Her absence was more a background to my life than anything else. ![]() For the first time, Ruth begins to wonder about the woman who abandoned her: “In a way it was as if she had never existed for me. Then, on her sixth birthday, a package arrives, containing a chunk of quartz along with a note, written in Lily’s hand, detailing when and where the rock was found. The arrangement works, and for a time, Ruth is happy. Ruth’s upbringing falls to her father and other family members, including Sol and his wife, Elka (who becomes like a surrogate mother) Nathan’s mother, Bella and Elka’s mother, Ida Pearl. The book alternates between chapters told in third person and those narrated by Lily and Nathan’s daughter, Ruth, who is barely three months old when her mother leaves to buy milk one afternoon and never returns. (Intuition and instinct are recurring themes in the novel.) When her erstwhile fiancé’s brother, Nathan, comes to apologize for Sol’s behaviour, he is instantly taken with Lily and soon proposes. Her intended, Sol, takes one look at her standing on the train platform and walks away, deciding that despite her beauty, there is something about her that doesn’t feel right. Nancy Richler’s third novel is an ambitious family drama set in postwar Montreal, where Polish Jew Lily Azerov has come to marry a man she has never met. ![]()
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