Write to Me

Binnie Solway is a middle-aged Brit with a lot on her mind. She is haunted by the memory of her first husband, disappointed in her second and anxious about her son William. He is so absorbed in his work as a research scientist that he seems oblivious to women, including Julia, who gets ``all dizzy just at the sight of him.'' The barely interconnecting lives of these three form the framework of a disappointing novel in which the past exerts a powerful pull on the present and human connections are as tenuous as a frayed thread. Binnie and William don't fully engage the reader until the book is drawing to a close, and the lovelorn Julia is less comically endearing than pathetic. Ferguson, who won the Somerset Maugham Award for her previous novel, Family Myths and Legends , is not without talent. A former nursing student, she is clearly in her element writing about the worn minds and twisted bodies of the elderly residents in the nursing home where Binnie works. But these luminous moments only draw attention to the lesser scenes that surround them. (Oct.)