The Gospel According to Cane

November 19, 2012
British author Newland (The Scholar) exposes the permanent nature of grief in his blurry new novel, the first to be published in America. Twenty years ago, Beverly Cottrell was a teacher in a private school living with her loving husband and infant son in a new house. During a brief stop on a trip, her son was kidnapped. Months of police investigation and media coverage turned up no clues. Eroded by grief, Beverly shut out her former life and ended up single and jobless. Now she leads a quiet life teaching creative writing to at-risk teens at a youth center in West London, playing board games with her neighbor, Ida, and writing in her journal. One day, a strange young man follows her home from the market, claiming to be her son, causing her precarious existence to fall apart. The wounds at Beverly’s core are rent open, made worse by her family and friends’ disapproval and skepticism over the boy’s identity. Although Newland’s novel gets bogged down in much weighty backstory, his characters are finely drawn with realistic ambiguity and genuinely exhibit the durability of grief and pain.

December 15, 2012
Abducted from a car 20 years ago, a lost child reappears--or is he a fake; someone claiming his identity, someone with a violent streak? In his U.S. debut, British novelist Newland delivers an intense portrait of mental conflict against a gritty inner-city background. The book we are reading is Beverley Cottrell's journal, an attempt to "make sense of the past twenty years' quiet madness." Beverley's settled life, comfortably married to Patrick, came to an end when their baby son Malakay was stolen. Now the marriage is over, her home is in public housing, and her job is teaching deprived teenagers at an after-school club. But everything changes when a boy follows her home one day, claiming to be her child. Although wary, Beverley lets him in and listens to his story. But is this young man really her son, and what sense can Beverley--who has complicated dreams of slavery, fire, cane and spider mothers--make of his story? This "journal of my pain" becomes a spiral of cathartic violence during which Newland deftly keeps the reader guessing. Boisterous street slang and the opinions of a younger generation lend vitality to an earnest domestic tragedy, but this is an uneasy fusion of troubled psychology and social issues.

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November 1, 2012

Beverley Cottrell's life was shattered when her little boy, Malakay, was kidnapped. Now the young man following her claims to be Malakay. A multi-award nominee, Newland has been called "one of Britain's most important black novelists" by Time Out London. Read up, Americans!

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2012
It's been 20 years, but Beverley Cottrell is slowly rebuilding her life. She had a great career, a loving husband, and a baby boy. Then the unimaginable happened. While her husband was picking up take-away Chinese, her infant son, Malakay, was snatched from the car, never to be found. Her marriage dissolved, and Beverley moved to London's inner city to hide from the world. She eventually found some solace in teaching literature to impoverished neighborhood kids in an after-school program, but the best she could do was keep her pain at arm's length. Now she notices an unfamiliar young man hanging around the area, then stalking her. Soon he slips past her building security and announces through the door that he is, in fact, her son. Author Newland is never concerned with the mystery of the kidnapping or the intervening years, but instead focuses on people facing tragedy, coping, and maybe struggling back into the light. The emotional tension is sometimes almost unbearable as a mother and son attempt to build a relationship out of their shared pain. A unique and very moving novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)