Road Ends – Mary Lawson
So after reading Crow Lake I moved straight onto this one (and I think this one is the better novel).
Here is the blurb …
He listened as their voices faded into the rumble of the falls. He was thinking about the lynx. The way it had looked at him, acknowledging his existence, then passing out of his life like smoke. . . It was the first thing—the only thing—that had managed, if only for a moment, to displace from his mind the image of the child. He had carried that image with him for a year now, and it had been a weight so great that sometimes he could hardly stand.
Mary Lawson’s beloved novels, Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, have delighted legions of readers around the world. The fictional, northern Ontario town of Struan, buried in the winter snows, is the vivid backdrop to her breathtaking new novel.
Roads End brings us a family unravelling in the aftermath of tragedy: Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, twenty-five years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years held the family together but has finally broken free and gone to England, to try to make a life of her own.
Roads End is Mary Lawson at her best. In this masterful, enthralling, tender novel, which ranges from the Ontario silver rush of the early 1900s to swinging London in the 1960s, she gently reveals the intricacies and anguish of family life, the push and pull of responsibility and individual desire, the way we can face tragedy, and in time, hope to start again.
This novel, like Crow Lake, is about families – relationships between parent and child, between siblings, who is responsible for whom. It is also about responsibility for our actions – accepting the consequences and finding a way to move forward. It is a beautifully written novel – the cold seeps of the page – and it is very moving. All of these people – Tom, Edward, Reverend Thomas – tormented by the past and their actions or lack of action. However, there is hope at the end.
More reviews …
https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2013/11/15/road_ends_by_mary_lawson_review.html