The Language of Light

The Language of Light, by Meg Waite Clayton.

I picked up the photograph he'd just set down, the eight-year-old girl craving her father's attention, his love. I still wanted to know that each time he'd said good-bye to me it had torn at him, each time he'd taken a picture of a child or climbed into his bed in some foreign hotel or sipped coffee as he read the Herald Tribune or looked out an airplane window or listened to the strange buzz of an English telephone, he'd thought of me, wished I were with him. I wanted to know he regretted all those days he hadn't gotten to see me. Not that he'd do it differently, but that he'd realized the cost of it as much as I had, that he had shared the cost.

I will be reviewing Meg Waite Clayton's newest book, The Four Ms. Bradwells, soon, and I wanted to read this book, which was one of her older ones (published in 2003). I had previously read The Wednesday Sisters by her, which was excellent, and this novel did not disappoint either. It follows Nelly Grace, recently widowed, as she moves back to her family's Baltimore home, in the "privileged horse-breeding world" in the countryside, and the people she meets there, who change her life.

4 stars out of 5.