What Is Left the Daughter [Kindle Edition]

Howard Norman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010: On a stormy Nova Scotia night in 1967, the loner Wyatt Hillyer has come to terms with his life's choices and self-imposed separation from his daughter Marlais. Realizing that one of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is an honest picture of himself, Wyatt has decided to write his memoirs in the form of a letter on the occasion of Marlais' twenty-first birthday. With great clarity and economy he slowly discloses the events of his parents’ scandalous deaths in 1941, his teenage years living with his aunt and uncle, the joys of fatherhood, and what led to his abandoning his only daughter and her mother. Returning to Canada's Maritime provinces in his latest novel, What Is Left the Daughter, acclaimed author Howard Norman has created an unpredictable and absorbing story of an imperfect and tragic life at a turning point. This short and potent novel will leave readers replaying events and reconsidering Wyatt and the other unique characters long after reading the final pages. --Lauren Nemroff

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Product Description
Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books--The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L--in this erotically charged and morally complex story.

Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges--the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin Tilda.

Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical incidents--including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland ferry Caribou, on which Aunt Constance Hillyer might or might not be traveling--lend intense narrative power to Norman's uncannily layered story.

Wyatt's account of the astonishing--not least to him--events leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks profoundly of the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with both despair and hope, to an audience of one.

An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his celebrated best.

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<br/ Amazon Exclusive: Howard Frank Mosher Reviews What Is Left the Daughter

Howard Frank Mosher is the author of 10 novels, his most recent book is Walking to Gatlinburg. Mosher's novel A Stranger in the Kingdom won the New England Book Award for Fiction and was made into a movie, as were his novels Disappearances and Where the Rivers Flow North. Read his guest review of What Is Left the Daughter:

As my sainted grandmother used to say, with a hard look right straight at 12-year-old, misbehaving me, let's not mince words here. Okay, let's not: Howard Norman's new novel, What Is Left the Daughter, is the best story of love in the time of war I've ever read. And yes, that includes Cold Mountain and A Farewell To Arms.

It's the early 1940s in Halifax, Nova Scotia. World War II, in all its fury, has come to Canada, as the dreaded German U-boats are sinking ferries and passenger ships just off the coast. In the meantime, 17-year-old Wyatt Hillyer's parents, caught up in a love triangle in which they've both fallen for a local switchboard operator and aspiring actress, have without warning leapt to their deaths "from separate bridges in Halifax on the same evening." Bereft and adrift, Wyatt soon moves to the tiny Bay of Fundy outport of Middle Economy, to work in his uncle's sled and toboggan shop.

It will come as no surprise to Norman's readers to learn that, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's jungle-village of Macondo, Middle Economy is a universe unto itself. What's more, its residents are every bit as strange and wondrous. For starters, there's kindly, plain-spoken Cornelia Tell, a one-woman Greek chorus of information and assessments. The town's aspiring stenographer, Lenore Teachout, takes down every conversation she overhears, and even transcribes the most awful war news over the radio. The casualty reports so distress Wyatt's eccentric uncle that he's papered the side of his toboggan shop with newspaper accounts of ships sunk by U-boats. Wyatt's beautiful, adopted cousin, Tilda, is obsessed by obituaries. Her dream in life is to become a "professional mourner" at the funerals of people who die without family or friends.

When Hans Mohring, a likable young refugee from Hitler's Germany, visits Middle Economy and falls in love with Tilda, all hell breaks loose in the village, including the bloodiest and most shocking murder in recent fiction, the strangest (and, in places, funniest) courtroom sequence I've ever read, and the unspeakably sorrowful, total dissolution of the Hillyer family.

Or does Wyatt's beloved family come totally unraveled in the onslaught of the war and its madness? Suffice it to say that What Is Left the Daughter, which is structured as a long letter from Wyatt, written in 1967 to his 21-year-old daughter, just may hold out the prospect of a transcendent love so powerful and enduring that it affirms the value and meaning of our lives even in the worst of times and despite all of our tragic flaws.

What Is Left the Daughter affirms what many of Howard Norman's readers have known since he published his magical first novel, The Northern Lights. Norman is most certainly one of America's three or four best novelists, with a uniquely wise and tolerant vision of his characters and all human beings everywhere. So let's not mince words. What Is Left the Daughter is a literary masterpiece that will, I guarantee it, live on in your heart, and mine, forever.

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From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set on the Atlantic coast of Canada during WWII, Norman's latest (after Devotion) is an expertly crafted tale of love during wartime. Wyatt Hillyer loses both his parents on the same day when they jump from different bridges in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after they discover they are both having affairs with the woman next door. Wyatt's aunt and uncle take him in, and Wyatt becomes his uncle's apprentice in his sled and toboggan business and, despite the circumstances, soon falls in love with his adopted cousin, Tilda. Yet he must resign himself to loving from a distance when Tilda brings home Hans Moehring, a German university student. The two begin a courtship harshly complicated by reports of U-boat attacks on Canadian ships, and Tilda's father becoming increasingly uneasy about this potential enemy in their midst. Norman's writing is effortless, and his plot is grand in scope but studded with moments of tenderness and intimacy that help crystallize the anxiety and weariness of life on the home front. That Norman is able to achieve so much in 250 pages is a testament to his mastery of the craft. (July)
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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 291 KB
• Print Length: 261 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0618735437
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 6, 2010)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B003U4VES0
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #107,360 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

HOWARD NORMAN is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His 1987 novel, The Northern Lights, was nominated for a National Book Award, as was his 1994 novel The Bird Artist. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, and Devotion. His books have been translated into twelve languages. Norman teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C., and Vermont with his wife and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Legacy of Loss, March 27, 2010

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Is Left the Daughter (Hardcover)

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This tenderly-written novel builds meticulously to a central climax and then leads away from it in a long dying fall. It is a sad book, shaded with evanescent emotions that are remarkably hard to pin down. But while I suspect it will resonate strongly with Howard Norman's fans, it did little to alter my previous opinion of his work, which was somewhere between admiration and annoyance.

The new book has many elements in common with the only other Norman novel that I have read, THE MUSEUM GUARD. Foremost, a beautifully evocative portrayal of life in Nova Scotia; Halifax in both books, but here also a small fishing community on the Bay of Fundy. Beyond that, the unstoppable encroachment of WW2, an important uncle/nephew relationship, an enigmatic love-object who goes her own way, the magnetic pull of distant Europe, and a curious fascination with menial jobs and long-stay city hotels. Both books also combine a fine-grained reality of detail with a certain fantasy of plot that some people will call poetic but merely perplexes me. If at times THE MUSEUM GUARD read almost as a fable, I accepted this as a fresh approach to writing about the Holocaust. Here, with less potent forces in play, the fabulous element is less strong, but I still felt torn between surrender to its pervasive melancholy and resistance against its implausibilities.

The narrator, Wyatt Hillyer, is orphaned at 19 by the simultaneous but separate suicides of his father and mother, both of whom were in love with the same woman. Very little is made of this sensational start, but it results in Wyatt moving down the coast as an apprentice to his uncle, a craftsman who builds toboggans. There, he falls in love with his cousin Tilda (adopted as a baby and so no blood relation). But Tilda is a free spirit with ideas of her own, one of which is to become a professional mourner, paid to weep spectacularly at other people's funerals. She also forms her own attachment to a German student, Hans Mohring. Although the son of anti-Hitler refugees, Hans in 1942 is still an object of suspicion along a coastline continually menaced by German U-boats. The events triggered by his arrival in the small village, and the long story of what happened afterwards, are the subject of Wyatt's narrative, in the form of a long letter to his daughter Marlais on her twenty-first birthday.

This could have been a good book, and for a while it drew me in. But I found it hard to see Tilda as a believably rounded character, I got annoyed with Wyatt's relative passivity, and found it impossible to like Hans. Since the three of them form the main love triangle, these are heavy liabilities. More serious still, I simply could not credit Wyatt's actions during the book's central crisis, which in turn affected all that followed. The place and the social atmosphere were well captured, but a chance use of the phrase "shipping news" made me long for Annie Proulx's novel of that title (THE SHIPPING NEWS), portraying emotional life in a very similar community with a hard-hewn compassion that Norman simply cannot touch. [3.5 stars]

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Love and death in Nova Scotia, March 10, 2010

By 

Frank J. Konopka (Shamokin, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Is Left the Daughter (Hardcover)

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I have read 3 previous books by Mr. Norman ("The Bird Artist", "The Museum Guard" and "The Haunting of L.") and enjoyed them all very much. I therefore came to this book with high expectations, and they were not disappointed.

Mr. Norman has a way with his stories of telling them in a calm and sure voice that reassures the reader while at the same time advancing the plot effortlessly. This plot involves a protagonist whose parents both commit suicide on the same day, by jumping from different bridges. He's then taken in by an Aunt and Uncle who have a daughter about his age. The uncle has a sled and toboggan making business, and our young man joins him in this.

It is 1941 and, in Nova Scotia, the threat of ship sinking by German subs is never very far from everyone's thoughts.In fact, the uncle has become obsessed with it, and papers the wall of his workshop with newspaper clippins and pictures about subs and sinkings.

The plot really takes off when the daughter brings home a young German student whose family fled to Denmark to escape the Nazis. Despite this, he is looked upon as a potential enemy by almost everyone in the small town where the action takes place. His arrival sets off a chain of events that is both tragic and heartfelt. To say more would be to ruin the book for potential readers.

All that I can say is that, if you enjoy a small story with believeable characters that is told in an excellent way, you will definitely find this book to your liking. It is highly recommended!

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A literary novel about a man's love for his daughter and the bad choices he's made, April 19, 2010

By 

Bill Garrison (Oklahoma City, OK USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Is Left the Daughter (Hardcover)

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WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER by Howard Norman is a literature novel by writer Howard Norman. I usually stick more to suspense thrillers, but picked this novel up through the Amazon Vine program because it sounded interesting.

Wyatt is seventeen years old when both of his parents commit suicide on the same evening because they were in love with the same woman. Wyatt goes to live with his aunt and uncle and cousin by adoption, Tilda. Wyatt immediately falls for Tilda, but complications arise when the dashing Hans Lohring enters the picture.

The novel is a straight character drama, filled with love, tragedy, loss and hope. Norman takes the novel to a level above most with the setting and characters. The novel is set in Canada , just as World War II is beginning and German U-boats are terrorizing the innocent. Hans is a German student studying in Canada , so he is faced with much hatred. Wyatt's aunt and uncle have there own problems in dealing with the war.

Even though I rarely read books like this, I really enjoyed this novel, which is an letter from Wyatt to his daughter explaining the twists and turns that his life took over the years in hope that he can be close to her once again.