I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed Howard Norman’s previous novels. Set in Nova Scotia in 1918, Toby, a crime reporter for a Halifax newspaper, is sent to Parrsboro to cover a murder trial. Elizabeth killed her husband a few hours after they were married and threw the gun into the blowhole of a beached whale. Elizabeth was already pregnant as a result of her other marriage. After she flees with the court stenographer, Toby returns to Halifax and his wife, Amelia, a busy doctor.. He was unaware that his life had changed course. This is a novel of grief, hope and love.

April 1918, Elizabeth Frame murders her new husband, Everett Dewis, hours after the wedding. Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, is a small fishing community by the Bay of Fundy, where journalist Tobias Havenshaw has been dispatched to report on the hearing.

Elizabeth is tall and “slim as a Christmas candle.” Wearing her wedding dress to her hearing, her “speech can seem like a pastiche of antiquities” as the judge halts the hearing to search for a dictionary. She describes the evening when, following their marital activities, she looks out on Parrsboro Harbor at a whale washed up on the beach and says, “come to the window.”. He wants to wait until morning, so she shoots him. Then Elizabeth drops a bombshell on the stunned court – weeks before marrying Everett, she married Oscar Asch in Halifax and now carries his child. Oh, and he gave her the wedding dress she wears. The hearing is interrupted by an explosion as the whale is dispatched with explosives. This hearing, very entertaining but resolving nothing, has been suspended when Elizabeth and the stenographer, Peter Lear, go on the lam.

While we check in periodically on Elizabeth and Peter, it is primarily Tobias’s story that threads throughout the novel with the final year of WWI and the raging Spanish flu as a backdrop. His wife, Amelia, arrives home from France, where she has been in working as a surgeon at the front; she continues working as a doctor in Halifax doing restorative surgeries on soldiers and battling the flu epidemic. Amelia and their marriage are very modern – too much for the time. But their relationship is so loving and delightful, and their banter has an exuberant energy. We meet many quirky characters whose uniqueness brings amusement to a story rich in language and description. A delightful, heartwarming novel.
--The Historical Novels Review, August 2024

I always enjoy books that transport me to different places and times. This story is set in Nova Scotia during WWI and as the Spanish Flu is ravaging populations everywhere. Toby is a reporter covering a very strange local murder, as his surgeon wife is returning from serving on the frontlines. He begins to tell his story in a sort of series of journal entries. While we know who the murderer is from the beginning, there are twist and turns to this tale. It is also impossible not to compare the world's current battles with Covid to those of the battle against the Spanish Flu.

Thanks to NetGalley the author and WW Norton & Company for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read Howard Norman's "The Bird Artist" many years ago so I was very excited to get a copy of his newest work.

This book begins with Elizabeth Frame murdering her husband very soon after getting married, and then follows a reporter there to cover the trial, Toby Havenshaw. As Toby travels back to his wife, the lasting impacts of Elizabeth's actions permeate through their lives.

I really liked the writing -- it was very descriptive and I could feel a lot of the emotions of the characters right alongside them. I really liked Toby, and I loved the direction his story went and how the book ended.

I will definitely be checking out more by Howard Norman!

Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book!

I was so happy to have the opportunity to read the new novel by Howard Norman. This new novel is a beautiful story of hope and resilience. Set in 1918 in Nova Scotia, at the end of WWI and during the Spanish flu pandemic the story follow the life of Toby, a crime reporter, and his wife Amelia, a surgeon.
This is not the first novel from this author (What is left the daughter was the first novel I read with my new kindle in 2011) and this new book was a confirmation that he is a gifetd storyteller. .
Thanks to @netgalley @w.w.norton for the ARC, I really enjoyed it!
#HowardNorman #CometotheWindow #wwnortonandcompany #NetGalley #bookstagram #bookreview

Small town scandal against the backdrop of world war and an international epidemic.

In April of 1918, in the small fishing village of Parrsboro in Nova Scotia, two astounding events happen more or less simultaneously. A large dead whale washes up on the beach, and a lovely young woman named Elizabeth Frame shoots and kills Everett Dewis, the man she had married some eleven hours earlier. As she testifies in her trial held in the local inn, she arose from the bed in their room at the top of the Ottawa House that night to gaze at the beached whale, and encouraged her husband to come to the window and view it as well. When he would not, she reached into his bag, grabbed his gun and shot him. Newspaper reporter Toby Havenshaw is sent by his editor at the Evening Mail to report on the proceedings, which only get stranger. Elizabeth, it is discovered, had married another man in Halifax (a Bavarian named Oscar Asch) shortly before her marriage to Everett, and is with child. The trial is interrupted first by a gaffe made by Peter Lear, the newly-minted court stenographer recently returned from serving overseas and suffering from bouts of shell shock, and then by a catastrophic explosion by the demolitionist hired to blow up the whale who (suffering himself from the aftereffects of war) decided to kill himself at the same time. In the chaos of that moment Elizabeth is allowed to escape in the company of Peter Lear. Toby returns to Halifax, at the same time as does his wife, a surgeon who has been doing wartime work in Europe and finds herself changed by her experiences there. The specter of the deadly influenza killing people all over the world is also hovering nearby. Toby remains fascinated by Elizabeth’s case and now her escape, and finds that his life will remain entwined in it as his career follows new paths, his wife struggles to put the horrors she witnessed behind her, and the epidemic sweeps through their corner of the world.
The writing of author Howard Norman, whose earlier novel The Bird Artist is one of my favorite novels, has a gentle elegance to it. His characters are everyday people whose lives unfold with dignity and compassion, and who live on in the reader’s memory beyond the last page. In a book with an adulterous murderer who sticks the gun she used to kill her husband in the blowhole of a whale, that character is certainly memorable, but so are Toby and his wife Amelia, a loving and well-matched couple who do their best to hold on to hope and happiness in a world full of war, death, and casual violence. As readers who have ourselves recently lived through a worldwide pandemic, the descriptions of precautions taken back in 1918 are eerily familiar, and the anti-immigrant zealotry and ever-present thoughts of war are echoed in today’s world as well. Do not be fooled by the relatively small size of the book, it is powerful and wise and it was a genuine pleasure to immerse myself in the prose. Readers of Kent Haruf, RIchard Ford and E. Annie Proulx will be well-pleased should they treat themselves to a copy of Come to the Window. Many thanks to NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for allowing me early access to this beautiful story.

Delighted to include this title in the July edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national lifestyle and culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

1918, the war in Europe and the Spanish flu. What else could go wrong? It left me in awe as I read deep into the night. Must read!

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Howard Norman tales of small town Nova Scotia focuses on the conflict between the town’s residents and always include a nautical experience. In this case, a young woman is on trial for murdering her newlywed husband. Her trial testimony shuts the defense when testifies that she had married another man shortly before this second wedding. I guess that gives a new meaning to shotgun wedding. Meanwhile a large whale died beached on the coastline and is beginning to decompose. The town hires a demolition expert to blow up the decaying whale body. It’s a hilarious story that is told from the perspective of an older couple that remind me of Nick and Nora in The Thin Man.

In the dimly lit St. George's Anglican Church, you can observe the joy at the baptismal fount, the soft whispers of newlyweds exchanging vows, and the hard grief alongside the mourners shaken by the deadly outreach of the Spanish Flu. There are never any guarantees in life. Not ever.

It's 1918 in the small village of Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. World War I adds another dimension. There are the returning soldiers fearful of closing their eyes at night. And then there are those in which reality leans heavily on the eyelids of those who will never return. 1918 will also bring about another impact never expected nor prepared for.

Elizabeth Frame, just twenty-four, beckons in the night to her newlywed husband, Everett: "Darling, come to the window." She spots an enormous beached whale dying in the sands in the moonlight. Everett refuses to come to the window and rolls over rather for sleep. It will be the last thing that this young man will ever do. Elizabeth will be arrested for his murder.

Howard Norman presents a novel in a continuous curving motion. "A collapse of the spirit" threads its way throughout these pages. And yet, in spite of the dread constantly delivered in 1918, there is a flicker of hope worn on the sleeve of Toby Havenshaw, a journalist for the Halifax Evening Mail. He's there to sit in the courtroom during the trial of Elizabeth Frame. At first, he's as perplexed as the rest of the attendees. No one can figure out the actions of Elizabeth who speaks in circles and quotes. Not even her mother, Elsbeth, who sits stoically behind her daughter.

Howard Norman's Come to the Window (Just check out the beautifully rendered cover) is a puzzle box of characters. The individuals in the courtroom sit and stare. "They've most of them gone inward." Emotions have been spent while living through the year of 1918. Facing Elizabeth is almost a daunting task.

But the character of Toby Havenshaw makes you believe in humanity once again. Norman carves out the strength of Toby and his wife, Amelia, a surgeon who has spent most of the year in France and Belgium under the dire circumstances of war. Their easiness of soft banter and genuine kindness adds so much to this remarkable novel. Howard Norman reminds us that the tragedies of life are also stepping stones to greater things to come.

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley for an honest review. My thanks to W.W. Norton & Company and to the talented Howard Norman for the opportunity.

Trying to get a full handle on Howard Norman’s “Come to the Window” is as slippery a proposition as trying to get a firm grasp on the poem from which the novel’s title is taken, Matthew Arnold's classic “Dover Beach.”
“Come to the window,” Arnold’s narrator exhorts the reader or perhaps a lover, with the look that the window affords of calm sea and tranquil bay, though no sooner is the exhortation made than it’s followed by stanzas of strife and confusion, ending with the disturbing image of "a darkling plain … where ignorant armies clash by night.”
The image, in reality, of the terrain of Norman’s novel, or at least that of the killing fields across the way from the immediate Nova Scotia location, where the horror of the war for residents mourning their losses is heightened by the impact of the so-called Spanish flu, whose lethality competed with that of the war and in fact claims the life of one of the novel’s principals.
Though for all the ever-present war and flu, they’re not front and center in the novel, whose immediate focus is the mystery of why a woman puts three bullets into her groom on her wedding night – or more precisely, into one of her husbands, with her being married twice. And indeed the novel opens with her trial, which newspaper reporter Toby Havenshaw has been dispatched to cover, with the bizarreness of the situation heightened by a whale that has washed ashore and into whose blowhole the accused has stashed her gun.
Enough, just those ingredients, along with the war and the flu in the background, to make for a compelling read, but the action is further intensified when the accused, who’s not been incarcerated, takes off with the court stenographer, a veteran who has been traumatized by what he endured in the war. And not just he who has been traumatized, but Toby’s wife, Amelia, a surgeon who has ministered enough to the war’s dead and dying to tell Toby upon her return that she's been “changed” by it.
Saying more would give away too much, just suffice to say that in addition to the reference to Arnold’s poem, there are other literary references suggesting larger concerns of the novel, including, with the whale, “Moby Dick,” and, with the name of the stenographer being Lear, perhaps Shakespeare. Further, with the last name of the accused being Frame and the word’s alternative meanings of enclosure or unjust accusation, there are hints of larger concerns there as well. But to my mind those possible concerns, if they're in fact there, aren’t as fully realized as they might have been, given the novel's brevity, which also made for some occasional disjointedness for me. Also, it was unclear to me at times, with an absence of stated attribution, who was speaking.
Still, an estimable accomplishment, Norman’s novel, which with its depiction of the flu had me reflecting on how thankful Amelia and the medical establishment back then would have been for a vaccine like the one developed in our time for Covid, whose tragedy was compounded by how so many of the deaths could have been prevented but for intransigent anti-vaccine stupidity.