Gillespie and I: A Novel
Harris, author of The Observations, follows up her smashing debut with another biting, character-driven satire. As elderly narrator Harriet Baxter takes a trip down memory lane, the story of an essentially lonely life punctuated by one period of giddy activity and involvement unfolds. When Harriet, a well-heeled, youngish Victorian spinster, travels to Glasgow in 1888 to take in the sights and sounds of the International Exhibition, a chance encounter embroils her in the middle of the eccentric Gillespie family. As she becomes indispensable to the clan, her relationship with Ned Gillespie, a struggling artist with a wife and two daughters to support, becomes more and more obsessive. The initially playful narrative tone darkens decidedly as the double mystery of Ned’s eventual suicide and Harriet’s reliability as a memoirist steadily unpeels. --Margaret Flanagan