The Photographer's Wife

December 14, 2015
Bestseller Joinson’s second novel (after A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar) explores another distant locale, this time Jerusalem in the 1920s. The story is seen through the eyes of 11-year-old Prue Ashton, whose father is a British architect in the holy city to redesign it, and from the point of view of British pilot William Harrington, hired by Prue’s father to assist Eleanora Rasul—the photographer’s wife of the title—in getting aerial shots of the city. As in her first book, there are two main story lines here: Prue’s life in Jerusalem in the 1920s on the one hand, which includes the provocative relationship between William and Eleanora, and on the other, the life the grown-up Prudence leads as an artist in Shoreham, a small British coastal town, in 1937. Readers see Prue both as an essentially abandoned young girl in Jerusalem, and the bold artist she becomes, fleeing her philandering husband in London and brazenly living with her lover and small son in Shoreham. Joinson’s compelling prose reveals the horrors young Prue experiences while living in the unsettled Middle East, showing how it will haunt her as an adult when Harrington comes back into her life in Shoreham.