The Sound of Her Name
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
It is June in the turbulent year of 1968. Tim Bruce is about to leave on a trip to Europe before being drafted into the war in Vietnam. At a party at his parent's home, he overhears his father, Carlton, tell a stranger about his service in the Second World War, a place called Clarrach, and a woman named Gwyneth. Carlton says, "I'd have married her if it hadn't been for the war."
Tim has never heard of this woman, and something in his father's voice makes him decide to seek her out. She lives near Clarrach, a small town high in the hills of Wales, in a house with thick stone walls, hand-hewn beams, and a roof of blue Welsh slate. Now married to the local doctor, Rhys Edwards, she is not happy to be reminded of a figure from her past.
Very reluctantly, she invites Tim into her house. Both expect this to be a mere fleeting visit, but circumstances beyond their control cause Tim to end up spending days with Gwyneth and Rhys. During that time, he learns of his father's connection to her, and comes to admire the acerbic Rhys and his way of practicing medicine. Tim falls in love with the ancient country of Wales and, especially, with the beautiful and enigmatic Gwyneth.
The Sound of Her Name spans two generations and two troubled times: the Vietnam era and the Second World War. It is a story of love, betrayal, and the loss of innocence, and also of a search for redemption, renewal, and forgiveness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rhys Edwards, an acerbic Welsh country doctor; Gwyneth, his beautiful, melancholy wife; and Tim, a handsome young American deciding between medical school and the Vietnam draft, test boundaries of love and family in Morgan's nostalgic novel (after 2002's Deeper Waters). After Tim overhears his father say that Gwyneth was the girl he would have liked to have married, he takes a detour from his postcollege European vacation to pay a surprise visit to Wales and see this Gwyneth for himself. The Edwardses welcome him for a meal, and a series of mishaps keep him there for weeks: he vomits at the news of Bobby Kennedy's assassination, brains himself on a wooden beam and finally sprains his ankle falling off a pile of boulders. Rhys takes Tim on eye-opening rounds to attend an ailing farmer and a home birth; Gwyneth shows him an awe-inspiring primitive monolith and later provides the key to her obsessive paintings. The outcome of Tim and Gwyneth's developing relationship feels inevitable (though some readers may find it both unlikely and weird), and characters' interior monologues can be leaden. Morgan handles the local color better, though, and the book really takes flight during the passages about Gwyneth's girlhood during WWII. Agents, Anna Cottle and Mary Alice Kerr.
