The Sound of Her Name

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.