Amanda
Sizzling with restrained eroticism, H. S. Cross’s historical novel Amanda is about two lovers driven apart by secrets and brought together again by irrepressible need.
In the interbellum period, Marion, who by day worked under a pseudonym at a leftist press, took the stage to read a poem in an Oxford nightclub. A PhD candidate, Jamie—a veteran, bishop’s son, and flu and mustard gas survivor with uncommon sexual tastes—was enraptured. He became certain that, though “there was no person living who knew him … suddenly, in a gesture of cosmic surprises, here was one who could.” So began their tempestuous multiyear affair, compromised by Marion’s shaded past and Jamie’s family’s judgments of her Irish Catholic roots.
When Marion disappeared, Jamie was left bereft. A year later, while deciding between a headmaster’s post at a failing school and the roles set up for him by his father and godfather, he hears that she’s back. He determines to become “that man, the man who would … convince her to have him.”
Its split narrative encompassing murder, a pandemic, the war, and the sexual underground, the book begins in the aftermath of Marion’s departure and threads, in wild form, through time until the lovers are in the same city again. Along the way, it unearths the skeletons of each with wrenching care: the losses that Marion concealed from Jamie; the self-doubt that he concealed from her; the prejudices and insecurities that got in their way. As they make their ways toward a consequential seaside meeting, ferried along by surprising allies, the question of whether they can overcome their doubts and fears to make a life together proves captivating.
Continuing storylines from Cross’s previous novel, Wilberforce, Amanda is a scintillating historical novel about the potential revival of a star-crossed love.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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