Coral Glynn (Cameron) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
There is an ancient class of vessels, found in Roman tombs, called lachrymatories: tiny glass flasks, often shaped like tears, into which mourners are said to have collected the spill of their weeping eyes. This entrancing image flitted through my mind as I read Peter Cameron's new novel, Coral Glynn. By the end of this sad, beautiful, absorbing story of love missed, love lost, love found, I was thinking that this must be what it's like to slip into a bath of hot tears.
New York Times Book Review


Like its packaging, Peter Cameron’s Coral Glynn is spare and unassuming. Mr. Cameron announces his talent in the way that matters: by telling a riveting tale with an often heartbreakingly pure prose style.... Though American, Mr. Cameron is presenting an updated version of the classic English novel of manners, with its themes of balked love and painfully polite misunderstandings. Every timorous gesture points to some profound psychological fear.... Scenes unfold with the exquisite design of a one-act play, with props skillfully deployed to comic and poignant effect.... [Cameron’s] writing...is bracingly unvarnished and unsentimental, stripped of pity or condescension. It is as though he has set an X-ray machine before the traditional English drawing room, leaving its demure occupants exposed in their loneliness and well-meant follies—and revealing them as movingly human.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal


Peter Cameron [is] an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer.... The plots, the ventures, the encounters of his characters, instead of taking them from point A to point B, abduct them into unintended and more expansive itineraries.
Richard Eder - Boston Globe


A big, dark house in the English countryside, with its brooding, damaged master; the pretty but gawky young woman who comes to work there—and to stumble over secrets in gloomy hallways: These are the elements of an old-fashioned gothic tale, and also of Peter Cameron’s lovely, enigmatic new novel, Coral Glynn.... There’s a way stories like this are supposed to go, and Coral Glynn both does and doesn’t play by the old rules.... Coral Glynn is a tribute to a certain breed of novel most often written by British women in the mid-20th century: astringently unsentimental, disciplined, replete with half-acknowledged emotions moving like the shadows of alarmingly large fish deep beneath the surface of the sea. Because their own time preferred to valorize a more chest-thumping sort of writer, their brilliance has been almost forgotten. Some, like Muriel Spark, never entirely slipped from view. Others, like Elizabeth Taylor, are just now being revived. There’s a dash of Daphne du Maurier here, too, and a touch of the sublime Barbara Pym.... Like Cameron’s novels, these books have won a following that makes up in tenacity for what it lacks in size. The audience for both keeps on growing, one devoted reader at a time.
Laura Miller - Salon


Coral comes across a young girl tied to a tree. She’s being pelted with pinecones by a young boy in a game they call Prisoner. Though she insists they stop, Coral takes no other action; the young girl is later murdered in the same forest; and suspicion—bizarrely—falls upon Coral. The book is suffused with a lonely sadness and an aura of the surreal, and the many dramatic events in Coral’s life are entirely plausible thanks to Cameron’s skill as a storyteller.
Publishers Weekly


With its atmospheric Fifties setting and stylish writing, this is one of Cameron’s...finest novels.
Library Journal


Cameron’s shimmering and expectant prose infuses this deceptively simple novel with an incandescent depth.... The decidedly somber and gothic tone of the narrative rings the perfect warning note as the reader begins to suspect that a standard fairy-tale ending is highly unlikely for a cast of lost souls forlornly muted by unrequited longings.
Booklist


[Cameron’s] chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities infrequently found in contemporary American fiction.... Cameron is above all a novelist of manners, building his effects from the drama and comedy of human relationships, working always on a small scale.
Christopher Beha - Bookforum


Shortly after World War II, Coral Glynn, a nurse, shows up at Hart House to take care of an elderly woman dying of cancer, and thus begins a series of unfortunate events.... A slowly unfolding novel that paradoxically contains both engaging characters and wooden dialogue.
Kirkus Reviews