A REMEMBRANCE OF DEATH

The lives of a young Oxford student dealing with personal hardships and a searching single mother intersect in Tweeddale’s historical novel.

In 1917, Basil Drewe arrives at Oxford to begin his time there as an undergraduate. Not only has he recently lost his eldest brother, Adrian, to World War I, he also finds getting around difficult, due to an accident he suffered a few years prior. Basil strikes up a friendship with a student from India named Laxman Choudhury; they become good friends, and Basil shows Laxman his wealthy family’s estate. In 1922, a single mother named Celia Lutyens, who lives in New York but grew up in England, visits California to see a spiritual leader called Krishnamurti, whom she first met in England when she was 14. Celia’s time in the United States proves to be much more dangerous than she could have imagined; in time, she’s back in England with her son, Robert, in tow. By this point, Basil is a busy lawyer; although he thinks he only has time for his career, his worldview changes when he meets Celia. Tweeddale’s novel follows these characters up to 1956 as their lives go through numerous developments. It’s a grand, multiyear saga that, much like the era depicted, is full of twists and turns. Could Laxman, in 1917, have imagined the circumstances that would one day result in his dream of an independent India? Such dramatic shifts continually give the reader cause to continue this monumental journey, although there are some periods of downtime; Celia’s trip to California, for instance, is described in bland detail, with colorless lines such as “The following day the train proceeded to Iowa and then Nebraska.” Ultimately, though, the story weaves a grand tapestry as it weaves its characters’ lives into the tumultuous world in which they live.

An often engaging drama set over decades of world change.