Book Of Lost Threads by Tess Evans
Allen and Unwin, $32.99
Novels, for all their categorisation as fiction, must, to some extent, draw on the writer's own experiences. Or they must, at least, be as Sebastian Faulks describes it, "umbilically connected to the real world".
In Book of Lost Threads, her first novel, Tess Evans uses her time as a counsellor for at-risk youth, solo parents and the socially bewildered to fill out her characters and endow them with at least a few foibles.
Moss (her nickname comes from the initials of her given names, Miranda Ophelia Sinclair) has left her Melbourne home to find her biological father, Finn. He is living as a recluse in a rural town in Victoria called Opportunity, trying to come to terms with the death of a young woman in a car crash 10 years earlier, for which he feels responsible. His aged neighbour, Lily Pargetter, still mourns her husband and her stillborn baby and knits tea cosies for the United Nations. Her nephew Sandy is the town's richest and most disliked man.
These disparate lives are drawn together by geography initially, and then by a growing concern for each other. Moss tries to discover the identity of her father's unknown victim in order to try and ease his guilt. Finn attempts to redirect Sandy's energies into something that will make him less of a laughing stock, and Sandy's concern for his increasingly frail aunt, whose loss is supplanted by concern for her young boarder Moss, weave the story together.
But the foibles are few and insignificant, and are generally outweighed by the characters' merits. The story works pretty well overall, but the passages describing Finn's time in a monastic retreat are overlong and mawkish, and detailed descriptions of monastery life add little to the narrative. The tea cosy side-story is endearing, if you can believe that successive UN employees are as caring as they are portrayed.
But given all that, the book is an easy read, and moving in parts, especially in the redemption of Sandy. It's scheduled for release in time for Mother's Day.
