The Truth of the Matter

by RobbFormanDew (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $22.36

  Agnes Scofield, the heroine of Dew's lovely, low-key period piece, can join Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Bridge at the tea table of exquisitely etched literary matrons. A respectable Ohio widow with three grown children, Agnes is beginning to carve out an independent middle-aged life for herself (which includes a secret lover) when, in 1947, her children all suddenly return to town. They have full lives of their own, but take for granted that Mother will always put supper on the table and never step outside her role as self- sacrificing, sexless matriarch. Dew's achievement is to capture both Agnes' ambivalence about these demands and the dignity in her struggle to meet them. -Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $6.41

  Widowed years before by her husband Warren's early death in an icy morning car crash, Agnes Scofield has grown into a woman of fierce and unconquerable independence. It is the 1940s in Washburn, Ohio, and the war has finally ended. Agnes' children are returning home - from Washington, D.C., from soldiering abroad-and bringing an end to Agnes' solitude in the great old family house. And to Agnes this means that she must accustom herself once more to her children's presence, to their notions of what kind of mother she has been for all these years. Hanging over the day-to-day events of life at Scofields are Agnes' constant memories of Warren, her feelings of devotion and resentment, and her long time suspicion that his untimely departure may not have been an accident. In this meditative novel of love and trust, lust and deception, Dew illuminates the small events that make up a lifetime. She is a marvel of a writer, and her spare and precise prose builds a world of startlingly lush and vivid detail.