Click Here To Purchase Letters from an Unknown Woman: A Novel

Author: Gerard Woodward

ISBN: 978-1-61145-312-6

Publisher: Arcade Publishing

(The following review was from an ARC of the book)

During World War II, Tory shared the family home with her crabby mother whom she refers to as Mrs. Head . At the time, Tory was employed in a factory that produced gelatin and it is here where she meets the owner of the factory, George Farraway.  Tory betrays her husband and enters into an adulterous affair with George and  under the influence of her indiscretion, she succumbs to Donald's obsessive wishes and decides to incorporate into her letters many of George's lovemaking utterances, which  proved to be quite tantalizing and spicy. Tory, however, is unaware that her husband derived little pleasure from these letters, as his requests were made purely for expedient reasons. It seems that George along with some of his co-prisoners were using these erotic letters that were written to them from their spouses as a means of bartering, wherein they would loan them in return for favors or goods, such as chocolate and a pinch of tobacco. And unbeknown to Tory, her letters became valuable currency and even the camp guards had expressed interest in them. Moreover, Tory would never have anticipated the consequences that these letters would have on her future life.

To rationalize her affair with George, Tory blames Donald and states that the affair was “simply the culmination of a research project that had begun the very first time she visited a library to peruse the 'For Adults Only' books, to examine the language of carnal desire. As such, it proved to be most productive because George Farraway had one special quality as a lover, “he liked to talk his way through the whole process.”

One day Donald receives a letter from Tory telling him that she adopted a little baby that she found in the ruins of a house after an air raid in Leicester. The truth, however, was that Tory had been impregnated by George and the baby was born out-of-wedlock. After the war ends, Donald returns home a broken man in a very depressed state with an injured leg. He is dysfunctional and unable to re-engage himself with his former life. He refuses to work and makes life miserable for Tory and his children including Tory's illegitimate son. Tory leaves the gelatin factory and takes up work in a public lavatory where she passes her time writing a novel.

Despite the theme's uniqueness, as well as Woodward's clever language and playful intellectual humor, I found the story didn't work for me and was not my cup of tea. After the first several chapters, I had to push myself to complete the novel and this is never a good sign. As I continued reading the story, the more it lost steam and the plot seemed to lack that certain extra magical pacing so vital in maintaining my interest. I guess what kept me going until the end was that the book does give the impression of weight and seriousness, however, I never quite found what the writing on the back cover stated: “Woodward offers a prescient examination of the ways in which we both nurture and consume each other in the face of adversity.”