Every Past Thing

All of the characters in this novel are historic figures. The remaining paintings of Edwin Romanzo Elmer are all in the collection of Smith College, and the image on the cover is the painting around which the book turns. A decade before the novel opens, Edwin and Mary lost their ten-year-old daughter, Effie, suddenly to illness. Neither of them ever recovered. Edwin grew increasingly solitary. Mary became lost in the fleeting love she'd had for a young boy a few years past and in denying to herself the more enduring attachment she felt to Edwin's brother.

In her 40th year, when she can stand the pain no more, Mary forces her husband to take her to New York City, where both of her other loves have gone. Once there, Edwin loses himself in an almost angry, animal attraction to his sister-in-law whose portrait he must paint. And Mary allows her desire for peace to take her through the city in search of one love that might put her heart and mind to rest.

This is an elegant book built on the real emotions of real people at a moment in history that was itself dangerous. And the writing in this debut novel is absolutely masterful.

So beautifully turned and intensely emotional is this novel that it should appeal to every woman who reads to fill her heart.Reminiscent not only of the work of Kazuo Ichiguro but of the masters, Virginia Woolf

"'A woman solicits a reunion with her former lover at the end of the 19th century in Thompson's debut novel, embarking on an overwrought reappraisal of her tragic past. At a notorious East Village anarchist watering hole (and also the last known address of her former secret beau, Jimmy Roberts), Mary Jane records in her notebook the events that have led her and her husband, the painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer, to New York City: the death of their only child, Effie; their estrangement and reunion with Edwin's imposing and wealthy brother, Samuel; and their family and social circle's tension-fraught relationships. Mary's days of secret escape are contrasted against Edwin's private turmoil as he struggles to secure a place at the National Academy of Design, while his thoughts are distracted by his wife's suspicious absences. Though the novel covers the course of a week, flashbacks expand the story's breadth and scope. Portentous prose may make a tough go of the novel's first half, but narrative urgency grows, albeit slowly, as connections between the characters are revealed. Readers fond of late 19th- century literature will appreciate this florid trip back in time. (Sept.)' Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Every Past Thing shares with Emily Barton's Brookland a perfectly surehanded sense of place and time, and with Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping a precise, unsentimental evocation of our deepest loves and family bonds. I've not been so moved by a novel in years; it seems to me truly stunning." — Andrea Barrett

"In Thompson's prose, attuned to every nuance of understated emotion, there is both power and wisdom--about family, life and death, grief, women longing for and demanding purpose and position, the ability of art to express, but also the pain of the unexpressed." — Susan Vreeland

"A novel to be savored." - Booklist

Pamela Thompson is the editorial director at Interlink Books/Olive Branch Press in Northampton. She lives with her husband and two children in Worthington, Massachusetts.