Major Pettigrew's Last Stand/Helen Simonson: A Passage

It was this kind of downpour day, and I cherished the excuse to read deeper into Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, a truly affecting debut novel by Helen Simonson.  What does love look like when it's new and you are not?  How does a man getting on in age combat the lusty greed of the son he sired?  What is it to stand in a familiar place and watch the coming end of day?  What is it to be proper in England and also, impeccably, falling in love with the Pakistani shopkeeper, Mrs. Ali?  Simonson's writing is enviably clear, perfectly transporting, not a wedge overdone.  Let me give you, at least, this:

They were at the lower fence now, and he was aware that one of the nails he had added was bent in half and shining with evidence of his incompetence.  He hoped she would see only the view beyond, where the sheep field fell away down a small fold between two hills to a copse thick with oaks.  Mrs. Ali leaned her arms on the flimsy top rail and considered the trees, which were now blending to a soft indigo in the fading light.  The rough grass on the western hill was already dark, while on the eastern flank it was losing the gold from its tips.  The ground breathed mist and the sky showed night gathering intensity in the east.

My thanks to Lilian Nattel and Ravenous Reader, trusted readers and bloggers, who were early in singing this novel's praises.

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Rejuvenated at Amada (and a NBG review/giveaway)

I have been in the kitchen for much of this summer—planning and cooking lunches and dinners, planning again, cooking again, starting again. Somewhere along the way, food lost its luster. Meals had become the thing to figure out, to be on the ready for. I wasn't, frankly, much in the mood, and the truth is: I miss my mother's cooking. No one ever did or will again cook like she did. I miss her simple chicken, her sandwich cookies, her inventions. My mother taught herself to cook. I never learned enough from her.

But last night, at a Philadelphia restaurant called Amada, I was blessed with the most exquisite meal I believe I have ever had. Spanish tapas of the authentic sort. Delicate prawns. Asparagus like candy. The sweetest serrano ham I've ever seen. Flatbread to die for. Ice cream like no other. And at the end, of it all a cookie thin as paper on a white rectangular dish.

Something was reborn in me, eating at Amada last evening. Something like hope. So this is what food can be, I thought. And this is pleasure. And this is the reward that life offers.

Becca is another reward that life offers — a brilliant reader and writer and teacher and liver of life. Today, in a beautiful gesture, she is offering a review of Nothing but Ghosts, as well as a giveaway. Visit her site, if you can.

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