The Story She Left Behind

In this captivating outing from Henry (The Secret Book of Flora Lea), a children’s book illustrator searches for her mother, a renowned children’s book author who disappeared decades earlier. Thirty-year-old Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham disappeared from her home on the South Carolina coast in 1927, leaving behind an unpublished sequel to the novel she wrote as a precocious 12-year-old, which made her famous. In 1952, Bronwyn’s daughter, Clara, gets a mysterious call from Charles Jameson, a Londoner who’s just discovered a satchel in his recently deceased father’s library filled with papers belonging to Bronwyn. Among the materials is a letter stipulating the satchel must be hand-delivered to Clara. She and her asthmatic eight-year-old daughter, Wynnie, arrive in London during the Great Smog, and they accept Charlie’s invitation to stay at his mother’s Lake District home, where the air is clearer. Clara feels very much at home on the pastoral landscape and finds a romantic spark with Charles. Henry imbues her story with lush descriptions of the landscape and intriguing linguistic puzzles as Clara attempts to decipher Bronwyn’s dictionary of the invented language that was central to her work. Readers will be riveted. (Mar.)