“Booker Prize 2021: 6 Books Sure to be shortlisted for this prize.
“A Town Called Solace”: In order of reading book number 3.
The boxes were in the middle of the floor, which made Clara fidgety. Every time the man came into the living room he had to walk around them. If he’d put them against a wall he wouldn’t have to do that and it would have looked much neater. 
And why would he bring them in from his car and then not unpack them? At first Clara had thought it meant that he was delivering them for Mrs Orchard and she would unpack them herself when she got home. But she hadn’t come home and the boxes were still there and so was the man, who didn’t belong.
Mary Lawson takes us to northern Ontario, 700 miles north of Toronto in this bitter sweet novel with the aptly named town. Clara, a young child is sat in her window looking out for the return of her sixteen year old sister, Rose, who has run away from home when she observes a stranger in the house opposite, mrs Orchard’s house. Mrs Orchard is Clara’s friend and she has given her a key to feed Moses the cat whilst she is in hospital. As Clara questions what she sees based on her 8 year old experience, her dialogue is reminiscent of another Klara from “Klara and the Sun” as illustrated in the opening quote.
The story is told from three points of view, Clara but also Liam, the stranger from the first quote, arriving after a painful separation and Mrs Orchard who has gone to hospital, the novel explores the implicit link between Liam, who as a young boy lived next to Mrs Orchard before moving away and Clara living next door to Mrs Orchard with both of the adults for different reasons having come to the improbable Solace in pain and both finding a sort of solace. Liam working for a local roofer who it turns out had never left Solace and slowly reflects about his life, even slowly remembering some of the forgotten time before moving away from next door to Mrs Orchard when he was young. The search for Rosa permeates the story, as the policeman says, they run away to Toronto, there really is nowhere else to go. Mrs Orchard thinks about the past, talking to her long dead husband from her hospital bed, talks about the importance of Clara to her and about Liam as she revisits her own traumas:
I can’t tell you how I long for home. Just the normal routines of the day; they’re what I miss most. Putting the kettle on. Perhaps having a little chat with Clara if she pops over after school. I enjoy our conversations very much, you never know where they’re going to end up. She doesn’t make my heart lift the way Liam did, but no other child has ever done that.
This slow moving story as people learn to live with life’s pains grows on you and as a reader you slow down to the speed of the story.
First Published in English as “A Town Called Solace” in 2021 by Vintage
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