Milo, a war veteran who suffered a spinal cord injury while overseas, is in a veteran's hospital; Honor is the phsyical therapist who visits him frequently to ease his pain. During their meetings, both are subject to stories from the past, although it is not clear at first how they are all connected. There's the couple from the Depression, Joe and Pearl, who are married but unable to conceive; Vivian, Pearl's cousin, offers an out for Joe's frustration. Anna, Iris and Alex are a small family in the 1960s who can't connect to each other, and a mysterious photographer who has all of her prints stolen from her apartment. Parvin and Hyacinth are forbidden lovers in Turkey in the seventeenth century. Music, especially jazz and swing, is sprinkled throughout all of these stories to impart the importance of rhythm in anyone's life: Joe is a traveling saxophonist, Honor listens to the Rolling Stones and Billie Holiday in her kitchen, Parvin is the inspiration for a beautiful set of cymbals.
While the novel sounds as though it could be hokey or confusing, the idea of seeing these stories is presented in a realistic way that is simple to follow. Mendelsohn writes with a deliberately slow pace, making it perfect to read over a lazy weekend. Her writing is poetic, and includes lines like, "His hands held her face in his, and she felt like a bird's egg: small and safe and about to be born." There is no great moral to this story, except perhaps the importance of forgiving the past, but with rhapsodic narrative like this, there doesn't need to be.
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