A review by eleanorfranzen
Turning for Home by Barney Norris

3.0

It's very hard to describe what Turning For Home is "about", because in the conventional sense it is virtually without plot: an old man, Robert Shawcross, has a birthday party, his troubled granddaughter Kate attempts to reconcile with her mother, and a figure from the past reappears at the party to complete some unfinished business related to Robert's career as a civil servant, during which time he served as a diplomatic backchannel between U.K. government and the IRA. It is a book much more concerned with states of mind: Robert's grief at the recent loss of his wife, his shock at the discovery that his contact was far more involved in IRA business than he realised; Kate's struggle with guilt over an ex-boyfriend's life-changing car accident, which manifests in an eating disorder that nearly kills her. This sounds a bit melodramatic, and occasionally Norris's plot and character choices are, but for the most part, his writing lifts the events from pot-boiler territory. Instead he shows us ways to find beauty, and the keys to memory, in absolutely everything; for all the trouble in its pages, it is a very uplifting book. I preferred his debut, Five Rivers Met..., but will be recommending this to lovers of introspective literary fiction.