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Summary
Summary
In 1920s Jerusalem, eleven-year-old Prudence watches her architect father launch an ambitious (and crazy) plan to redesign the Holy City by importing English parks to the desert. He employs a British pilot, William Harrington, to take aerial photographs of the city, and soon Prue becomes uncomfortably aware of the attraction flaring between Harrington and Eleanora, the young English wife of a famous Jerusalem photographer. Palestine has been a surprisingly harmonious mix of British colonials, exiled Armenians, and Greek, Arab, and Jewish officials rubbing elbows, but there are simmers of trouble ahead. When Harrington learns that Eleanora's husband is part of an underground group intent on removing the British, a dangerous game begins.
Years later, in 1937, Prue is an artist living a reclusive life by the sea when Harrington pays her a surprise visit. What he reveals unravels her world, and she must follow the threads that lead her back to secrets long-ago buried in Jerusalem.
The Photographer's Wife is a powerful story of betrayal: between father and daughter, between husband and wife, and between nations and people, set in the complex period between the two world wars.
Author Notes
Suzanne Joinson is an award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times , Vogue UK , Aeon , Lonely Planet , and the Independent on Sunday . Her first novel, A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar , was translated into sixteen languages and was a national bestseller. She lives in Sussex, England.
suzannejoinson.com / @suzyjoinson
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
In Joinson's second exploration of British misadventures abroad (A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar, 2012), a lonely 11-year-old in 1920 Jerusalem witnesses and inadvertently participates in adult intrigues, both political and personal, which haunt her later life as a troubled artist. After her mother's commitment to an asylum, Prue is living at Jerusalem's Hotel Fast with her father, Charles, an architect planning a system of English-style gardens for the city. Ignored by Charles, Prue attaches herself to Eleanora, the young British wife of Arab photographer Khaled Rasul, and to Ihsan, who's been hired to teach Prue Arabic. Encouraged by Ihsan, Prue spies on the adults around her, often misconstruing events and relationships, especially after the arrival of the emotionally damaged British Word War I pilot William, whom Eleanora knew in England. As the arrogant British powers that be reluctantly try to confront an officer running amok killing locals, Prue finds herself in the middle of horrendous violence. Interwoven with Prue's childhood is the story of her life as an artist and mother back in England. In 1937, Prue has left her foppish British husband, Piers, and lives in Shoreham with her small son, Skip; she's preparing a show of her sculpture when William pays her a visit. A moving, disturbed, and disturbing character in his own right, William tells Prue that Ihsan has died and asks for an envelope Ihsan left with her on a visit to England in 1933. While Joinson layers on a John le Carr-lite plot involving British intelligence, what matters are the memories that flood back for Prue, showing how the demons from her childhood have contributed to both her creativity and her difficulties as a wife and mother. While Prue and William have dark pasts, Joinson wisely allows for degrees of redemption and growth in each. Atmospheric, romantic, yet refreshingly acerbicJoinson's timely portrayal of the difficult relationships between different cultures is rivaled by her heartbreaking delineation of the fragile relationships between individuals. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
DESPITE ITS TITLE, Suzanne Joinson's dreamlike second novel belongs not to Eleanora Rasul, the British wife of an Arab photographer, but to a complex, willful and sometimes off-putting woman named Prudence Ashton. First encountered in 1920 as a lonely 11-year-old trapped in the Holy Land by her father's government job, Prue is allowed to wander the desert with her own Kodak. There she runs into Willie, the shellshocked aviator her father has hired to survey Jerusalem and help modernize the city - that is, to make it more like London, with tidy public parks and signs of Arab habitation removed. Join son, whose first novel, "A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar," set her characters wandering through Central Asia, is again concerned with people looking for a guide, a map, some thread to lead them through the maze of their own lives. From one chance meeting come "spirals of confessions" among a large cast of finely drawn characters, all with nicely individual quirks and passions. Most lead to the adult Prue, who becomes an artist living in an English seaside village. In Jerusalem, both Prue and Willie are fascinated with casually glamorous Eleanora, the great love of Willie's youth, who scandalized the British expatriate community by marrying her Arab. Willie, of course, wants her for himself, but the Great War has left him with physical and psychological scars that make this very difficult. Prue more simply yearns to be like Eleanora, yet it's that fierce love that proves most dangerous when her Arab tutor manipulates her into spying on the English, by saying it's for Eleanora's sake. Just how risky it is to love Eleanora will become clear after the passing years reveal the true reason for all those maps Prue's fez-wearing father makes of the city, the darker purpose behind Prue's lessons in code writing and the significance of marginal characters like the man called "Lofty" McLaughlin, who seems too crazy to be a threat. Prue takes over narrating her own story in 1937, when she's living with her young son in a derelict railway car parked in the small town of Shoreham. There her work as an artist involves broken statues rescued from Malta, deepening their flaws and boring spiral holes in the soft stone for a London art show. "I would like to make everything secret inside of me public so that there is nothing left in there, festering," she declares. "That is art." Prue seems to be a frank narrator, cataloging a trunkful of ragged finery, a fistfighting lover and a body kept bony on tea and toast. She thinks she's doing well; even her hands have apparently lost their childhood nervous twitch. And then a man from her past reappears, amid rumors of another possible war. Prue realizes she has forgotten some secrets, secrets she and her son will now need to remember. The novel's political story line is subtly powerful, but perhaps the greatest reason to keep reading is to find out how the young Prue became this difficult, complicated woman - how she dropped her girlish crush and her camera in order to rework the sort of statues her father planned to destroy. Offhand comments inform us that she has been a model for Surrealist artists and has sneaked into classes at the Slade to learn her craft. She's indifferent to her philandering ex-husband but adores their son. Though many of the patterns are open to easy interpretation - her father was a cheater, so she marries a cheater - a few of the holes in her story are filled rather late. Amid some exquisite prose, elaborate and occasionally distracting systems of metaphor add to the novel's oneiric quality, seeming to promise a psychological armature, another code to break. Whether described in the first person or the third, there's a bird on almost every page, as well as birdlike airplanes and feathered hats. Images of spirals, staircases and mazes appear often, as do uneasy references to the passing of time. The images are ubiquitous - but how deeply should we read their meaning? Perhaps not at all; perhaps we should merely observe. Early on, Willie follows Eleanora into a Jerusalem souk, and it was "like being led into a trap.... He was felled, again, by her particular, stalking beauty." That selfsame sheer beauty stalks the empty spaces of this stubborn, lyrical novel. SUSANN COKAL'S most recent novel, "The Kingdom of Little Wounds," will be released in paperback this month.
Library Journal Review
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. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
