Book of the Week #46

A Century of November by W. D. Wetherell (Ann Arbor, Michigan: 2004)

This novel by Lyme, NH resident W. D. Wetherell was the winner of the 2004 Michigan Literary Fiction Award:

"A Century of November is an elegant, moving, and utterly convincing account of a father's attempt to understand the death of his only son in the trenches of Belgium during the very last days of World War I. In a strangely timeless and
hypnotic narrative reminiscent of the best poetry of Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke or Timothy Findley's haunting novel The Wars, the author evokes the unvoiced grief and rage of a man who has recently lost his wife to the Spanish
Influenza and his son to a battle in a town whose name he can't pronounce. Impulsively boarding a ferry, then a train, then a steamship, Charles Marden travels from his farm in Vancouver to the killing fields of Europe. Following the shadow of the first and only woman his son ever loved, Marden stumbles across a chaotic landscape so recently drenched by blood and poison gas that the truth seems not only difficult to ascertain, but ultimately unknowable and irrelevant."
-- Eileen Pollack, a MLFA judge.