A Year of Marvelous Ways

Set in late 1947 in the fictional Cornish hamlet of St. Ophere, the novel interweaves the lives of Marvelous Ways, a nearly 90-year-old woman with an extraordinary past, and Drake, a traumatized World War II veteran, as they converge at a tidal creek where Marvelous has lived most of her life.

Marvelous stands by the roadside of the hamlet, now desolate. Its granite cottages are boarded up, the population having dwindled after the First World War and the suicide of returned soldier Simeon Rundle, whose death tainted the village with ill luck. The war memorial lists the fallen but excludes Simeon's name. Marvelous has been waiting for something she cannot identify, a feeling from a dream she shared with her late lover, Paper Jack. Each night she lights a candle in the ruined island church in the creek. During the war, she told a Black American soldier named Henry Manfred Gladstone II to "go left" before D-Day. A recurring dream instructs her to open the boathouse she sealed 25 years ago after Paper Jack's death. Inside, she imagines Jack's voice telling her he is coming back.

The narrative shifts to Drake (Francis Drake), a fatherless young Londoner crossing the English Channel seven years after he left. He carries deep psychological wounds and a letter from a dying soldier named Dougie Arnold, which Drake promised to deliver to Dougie's father, a doctor in Cornwall. In London, he visits childhood haunts near St. Paul's Cathedral. His mother died of a broken heart when he was 11 after his father, a sailor known only as "Lucky," never returned.

At Paddington station, Drake spots Missy Hall, his third cousin and the closest bond of his youth. When he was 11 and she was 16, Missy renamed him "Freddy" and taught him about love before leaving abruptly, slipping a drawing of her hand under his door inscribed "Not too much, Freddy. Never forget me." Drake believed she died in the Blitz bombing of the Café de Paris. He follows her through the London Underground, catches her in Spitalfields, and they reunite. Drake shows her the letter and a collage of his absent father's face, pieced together from magazine clippings.

That night, Missy reflects on a wartime secret: anonymous sexual encounters in the darkness of a bomb shelter. The next day, Missy is distant. At the Thames foreshore, she tells Drake about a mermaid her grandmother's mother saw, a creature who had "seen too much" to be happy, and identifies with the mermaid. She asks Drake to turn around and sing. When he turns back, she is gone beneath the water. Only her shoes remain.

Shattered, Drake wanders London before drunkenly boarding a train southwest. He collapses in the woods near St. Ophere, where Marvelous finds him near death. She washes him, dresses him in Paper Jack's clothes, and puts him to bed in the boathouse. Over the following weeks, she nurses him to health, and they begin sharing their stories.

Marvelous tells Drake her origin story: Her mother, she says, was a mermaid from South Carolina. Her father, William Ways, brought her mother to England, but the woman was unhappy and took to midnight swims in the Thames. She was shot shortly after Marvelous's birth, mistaken for a seal. William sent the infant to London relatives, then walked the Cornish peninsula for nine years before finding his calling as a healer. He brought Marvelous back at age 10, and they traveled Cornwall tending the dying until he died when she was 14.

Marvelous recounts her three great loves: a lighthouse keeper's daughter who was her first lover at 17; Fire-Out Jimmy, a charismatic miner she lived with on the moor; and Jack, Jimmy's younger brother, whose face she recognized from a Midsummer's Day divination. She stayed loyal to Jimmy even as she fell in love with Jack. On the morning Jack and Marvelous planned to run away together, they both collapsed, sensing Jimmy's death in a mine. Jack carried his brother out, and Jimmy whispered something before dying that chained Jack with guilt. Jack left, and Marvelous waited 20 years. When Paper Jack finally returned in 1921, he was near death, dressed in a coat made of newspaper. They married privately, and he died within a year. The villagers buried him against her wishes, and Marvelous, consumed by grief, lived in the woods until a doctor found her.

As Drake heals, he explores Marvelous's caravan and finds her locked Marvelous Book of Truths. During a flooding high tide, Marvelous paddles him into the submerged church, where model boats line the walls, each named after a child she delivered. She tells him faith is about love, not God, and declares she has faith in him.

Drake delivers Dougie's letter to Dr. James Arnold in Truro. The doctor reveals that Marvelous delivered Dougie as a baby and visited her 25 years earlier, diagnosing grief, not madness. He shows Drake a museum painting, Lady of the Sea, a portrait of Marvelous's mother, a Black woman likely formerly enslaved whose compulsive swimming was a form of purification rather than the mermaid story Marvelous tells. Drake returns to the creek with a dowsing rod from the doctor and decides to stay.

At Christmas, Drake brings Marvelous to the museum to see her mother's portrait for the first time in her 90 years. She stands before the painting and whispers to it. He gives her a tube of red lipstick, and she holds it up in the falling snow.

In January, Marvelous begins dreaming Drake's wartime nightmares. She collapses and is found frost-covered on the riverbank. When she recovers, she gives Drake a playing card, the nine of diamonds, confirming she has seen his deepest secret. He confesses: Near the war's end, five fellow soldiers raped a French woman while he walked away instead of stopping them. After his confession, Marvelous leads him to the river. He wades in and floats for the first time, surrendering his lifelong fear of water.

Spring brings Peace Rundle, Simeon Rundle's sister and the last child Marvelous delivered, who reopens the old bakehouse after her family left St. Ophere in disgrace following Simeon's suicide. Drake builds a bridge to the island church for Marvelous and paints Simeon's name on the war memorial in cobalt blue, restoring the recognition the village denied him. Ned Blaney, a quiet fisherman, begins courting Peace. A postcard from Henry confirms he survived Omaha Beach by going left. Then a postcard arrives from Australia: "Freddy, I saw the mermaid." Missy is alive. Drake is devastated, retreating into rage before Ned steadies him on his fishing boat with a toast: "To life." Drake takes the tiller toward the horizon.

In autumn, Marvelous prepares for death. She lays out her treasured possessions and leaves the key in the lock of her Book of Truths. Drake finds the caravan orderly and opens the book. Inside he finds nothing but dust and a photograph that falls from between the pages. On the back: "Your father." He turns it over and sees the face he pieced together from magazines as a child. His father was Paper Jack. Jack Francis.

Marvelous says goodbye to every corner of her world, then leads Drake across the bridge he built to a gravestone he has never noticed: JACK FRANCIS. "It's your story," she tells him. "It's only ever been your story." She walks toward the river, seeing her loved ones waiting on the crest of the water. She dives in and is home.