The Old Wives' Tale

Two sisters. Sixty-five years. One stays in the dusty drapery shop of provincial Bursley; the other runs away to Paris and disappears into glamorous squalor. Arnold Bennett spent a decade writing this novel, and every page bears the weight of his obsession with what time does to ordinary lives. Constance and Sophia Baines begin as giggling girls in their father's shop in the Five Towns of Staffordshire, squabbling over servants and dreaming of futures they can't quite imagine. Then the decades collapse. Bennett captures the invisible tragedy of change itself, not dramatic disasters, but the slow accumulation of small choices and non-choices that reshape a life. The sisters reunite as old women, their youth vanished so gradually they never noticed it leaving. Bennett wrote the book after seeing an ancient woman in a Parisian restaurant and thinking: she was once young. That moment of recognition, that every stout old woman was once a girl with the whole world in her face, is the ache that powers this novel. It's a book that rewards patience. The prose moves at the pace of actual life, with all its tedium and sudden illuminations. If you've ever wondered how you became who you are, or looked at an old photograph of yourself and felt the strange grief of recognition, this novel will break you open.