A Novel.
When seventeen-year-old Henry Shaw accidentally stumbles into his mother's e-mail file and finds her confession of infidelity, he is unable to resist becoming an electronic eavesdropper. For a year, he secretly monitors his mother's passionate other life, in her e-mail correspondence with her lover.
But Henry's observations, set down a decade after that fateful year, are much more than the "old story" of his mother's adulterous affair with a romantic violin maker. His confused feelings about his mother's secret infatuation colour his own tentative explorations of love and sex, and affect the way he views his father, a history teacher, and his wayward younger sister.
Gradually the relationships between all the members of the family are put to the test, a cohesiveness previously strained only by the parents' row over Henry's younger sister's insistence on dressing in the regimental uniform of a Civil War drummer boy. For tomboy Elvira, much to her mother's despair and her father's pride, is a hardcore Civil War re-enactor, and it is only after she is given a hard lesson in the intolerance of her fellows that she and her mother are brought back to present-day reality.
With her inimitable grace, humour and compassion, Jane Hamilton has created a novel full of rich insights into the nature of love and the deep, mysterious bonds that hold families together.
