This page provides information on one of Wendy's books, including publication details, description, Wendy's recommendations, purchasing info and more.

The House at Evelyn's Pond

Description:

Centered around a woman's voyage to arrange her mother's funeral, this novel weaves the life stories of three generations of women and their loves.

Ruth is not an easy mother to live up to. Oxford-educated, a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary during the second world war, she marries a Canadian navigator and returns with him to the family farm in Nova Scotia, where she throws herself into researching his Acadian French ancestors and carving a heritage for her three children. Clever, witty and proud, she keeps resolutely hidden her grief over her own lack of history or family.

Her daughter Jane, a primary school teacher, travels to Europe in the 1960s, and on the Magical Mystery bus tour, meets and marries an Australian dairy farmer. She reflects later: she'd gone to Europe to finish growing up, but she'd married Ian instead and somehow along the way she'd exchanged living up to her mother for living up to her husband. Even Jane's daughter Megan, a mildly psychic acupuncturist, exudes a self confidence that escapes her mother.

Now, while Megan is hiking Canada's west coast and falling in love, the recently widowed Ruth returns to England for the first time in fifty years, and dies in her cousin's home. Jane must fly out from Australia, make the arrangements and return her mother's ashes to Canada. She will stay with her mother's cousin outside London, where she had also stayed thirty years earlier on the trip when she met Ian. It is a time for memories and reflections, not all of them comfortable, and this will only intensify when she returns to her mother's house at Evelyn's Pond. Alone in her childhood home, surrounded by mementoes of the past, she must face herself and her future in two critical days and nights of discovery and decision.

Reviews:

"A delightful, insightful story," The Australian Women's Weekly, September 2001

"Orr deftly weaves the themes of family, migration, identity, history and love," Australian Bookseller & Publisher, July 2001

"...She has vividly recreated the places and the times that these three women live(d) through." Good Reading, August 2001

"...the literary equalent to SeaChange"
"Orr's own web of narrative, overlapping between past and present, is an engaging story, confidently told and finely crafted."
"The House at Evelyn's Pond holds its own in the company of Tyler and Trollope, and presents a strong foundation for establishing Orr's own band of loyal readers." Australian Book Review, December 2001

Wendy's Comments:

Although many people presume that this book is autobiographical, the truth is that the intersections of my life with Jane's are geographical rather than personal. Like Jane, I am a Canadian who met an Australian in England, married him and moved to rural Australia. Apart from these broad brush strokes, our lives, our personalities, our families and our husbands, are quite different.    read more

Purchasing Information:

The House at Evelyn's Pond is currently in print and available at bookshops in Australia and New Zealand.

Or you can purchase it online:
in Australia at The Well
in Japan at Amazon.co.jp

Awards:

Shortlisted for the The Vision Australia Library Award for Adult Audio Book of the Year and Adult Narrator of the Year for narrator Stephanie Daniel, 2002 (refers to the Louis Braille Books audio book edition)

Editions and Translations:

Issued in audio book format by Louis Braille Books, 2002, ISBN 0 7320 2594 X

Wendy's Recommendations:

If you liked The House at Evelyn's Pond, I think you'll also enjoy these books:
   Peeling the Onion

And by other authors:
   The Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
   Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark

More About This Book:

Notes for Reading Groups