Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A tragic love story becomes a journalist’s obsession. This novel by Norman, like much of his fiction, is constructed out of a handful of reliable elements. Nova Scotia setting? Check. Quirky protagonist? Check: The narrator, Toby Havenshaw, is a courts-and-cops reporter gathering notes for a book on insomnia. Crime of passion? Check: Toby is covering the trial of a woman, Elizabeth Frame, accused of killing her husband on their wedding night in a seaside hotel. But there are some unique elements, most obviously the whale that has beached on that seaside. And into whose blowhole Elizabeth has tossed the murder weapon. And which is ultimately, spectacularly blown up. Not to mention that Elizabeth is pregnant from a man she was married to before her slain husband—and has run off with a PTSD-struck court stenographer after the explosion. It says something about Norman’s command as a novelist that this setup doesn’t read as comic, or even particularly absurd—as usual in his work, he conjures up a world where calamity is the norm, and his heroes’ roles are to find poise somehow within it. Because the novel is set in 1918, as the Spanish flu begins running rampant through Nova Scotia, it’s hard not to read it as a Covid-19 allegory, echoing contemporary paranoia and nativism. “Today…is going to be busy as any day in the Old Testament,” one character says, and the novel does create the feeling that epic, tragic, metaphorical events stalk Toby wherever he goes. Yet for all the chaos, Norman has written what is at heart a tender book, sensitive to the surprising nature of relationships, the depths of personal trauma, and the capacity of affection to alleviate the pain. A well-turned story suffused with Norman’s trademark melancholy. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.