An Imaginative Experience

A traveller on an InterCity train returning to London smells the burn of brakes as it hisses to a stop in the middle of the countryside. He sees a white-faced woman leap from the train and race to the aid of a sheep stranded on its back in a field, unable to rise. Righting it, the woman turns, and he sees her face is full of tragedy.

Considering tragedies of his own, he does not intrude, but the image lodges in his mind: a strange but familiar despair, unable, despite itself, to ignore the desperation it recognizes in others. From these seeds Mary Wesley draws out a plot of an unforgettable impact: of loss, of release, of a necessarily comic acceptance of fate, of love — “the imaginative experience.”

Rich in character and wit, and powerfully moving, this is a novel of the heart’s pain and deliverance.