When her book first came out last spring, nobody had heard of author Helen Simonson. At first glance, the book, "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand," looked like a sweet and proper old-fashioned English novel. And it is, in a way. It is sweet. It is proper. It is set in an old-fashioned village in England. But the story is subversive and, because of that, very wonderful. It is about a retired military man and his secret love for the village shopkeeper--a Pakistani woman named Mrs. Ali. It is about the friction between the major and his money-grubbing son, and it is about how some dastardly foreigners (ahem--Americans) want to tear up the village in the name of progress.
Simonson's writing is terrific, her characters are fun and quirky, and the book very quietly but squarely addresses all kinds of modern issues: racism, immigration, development, the oppression of women in the name of religion, and the generation (and culture) gap. Or you can just read it as a love story.
The book became a sleeper hit, praised in the New York Times, the Washington Post, O Magazine, the Boston Globe, and, of course, the Minneapolis Star Tribune. (Our review is here.)
It is newly published in paperback, and the author is coming to Twin Cities. She'll be at the Bookcase, 607 E. Lake St., Wayzata, at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 2. She's expected to draw a big crowd, much as Annie Barrows, co-author of "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" did two years ago. Another charming sleeper hit from across the ocean--another book that, subversively, wraps politics neatly into a charming love story.
