The Photographer's Wife

December 14, 2015
Bestseller Joinson’s second novel (after A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar) explores another distant locale, this time Jerusalem in the 1920s. The story is seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Prue Ashton, whose father is a British architect in the holy city to redesign it, and from the point of view of British pilot William Harrington, hired by Prue’s father to assist Eleanora Rasul—the photographer’s wife of the title—in getting aerial shots of the city. As in her first book, there are two main story lines here: Prue’s life in Jerusalem in the 1920s on the one hand, which includes the provocative relationship between William and Eleanora, and on the other, the life the grown-up Prudence leads as an artist in Shoreham, a small British coastal town, in 1937. Readers see Prue both as an essentially abandoned young girl in Jerusalem, and the bold artist she becomes, fleeing her philandering husband in London and brazenly living with her lover and small son in Shoreham. Joinson’s compelling prose reveals the horrors young Prue experiences while living in the unsettled Middle East, showing how it will haunt her as an adult when Harrington comes back into her life in Shoreham.

December 1, 2015

In 1920 Jerusalem, Prue Ashton arrives from England to stay with her architect father after her mother is hospitalized owing to a mental breakdown. Once there, she is mostly left to her own devices. A lonely 11-year-old child, Prue is easily befriended by a local, who persuades her to observe her father and his associates and gather intelligence about his plans for the redevelopment of Palestine. Traveling alone by train one day, Prue encounters Willie Harrington, a World War I pilot who has been hired by her father to take aerial photographs that will facilitate his design plans for the region. Harrington's ulterior motive for accepting the post is his wish to reconnect with his childhood friend, Eleanora, and free her from what he sees as an unsuitable marriage to an Arab photographer. Seventeen years later, with a new global conflict looming, Prue is living with her young son in Shoreham, England, when she is approached by Willie, who is desperate to recover the damning photographic evidence of their time in Palestine. VERDICT As she did so beguilingly in A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, Joinson again creates an atmospheric story that races toward a tense conclusion. This is historical fiction at its most pleasurable. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

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