Peter Ferry (Travel Writing) crafts a wise and delicate novel of aging, love and autonomy in Old Heart.
Tom Johnson is 85. He has been widowed, and thereby freed from a troubled marriage. His adult children have begun pressuring him to sell the house in Illinois and move into a home, and the death of a son who had Down syndrome has given Tom the opportunity to pursue an old mystery. So Tom runs away, leaving no clues behind save a note for his family: "I am not coming back." He then travels to the Netherlands to track down a Dutch woman he knew during World War II, with whom he had "invented love."
The half-hidden narrator of Old Heart is Tom's granddaughter Nora, a graduate student who had just begun recording the story of Tom's return from the war and the beginning of his long-lived but unhappy marriage. When Tom makes his escape, Nora is the only one he takes into his confidence, and she relates parts of his story from her perspective. In other chapters, he chronicles his personal history in long letters to Nora.
Old Heart is earnest and occasionally sentimental, but also pensive and eventually enlightened. It is at once a romance, a meditation on the complications of end-of-life independence and the responsibilities of family, and a lovely personal history. In a slim, unassuming read, Ferry opens intriguing questions and introduces his reader to complex and deeply likable characters. The result is delightfully warm and universally appealing. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia