Fonseca

The public drama of Penelope Fitzgerald's life came late, as she burst into literary fame in her sixties after years of poverty and quiet desperation. She mined those private years for much of her fiction, but she never wrote about, and hardly documented, one strange episode: her trip with her young son to Mexico in the rash hope of an inheritance from distant relatives there. From this gap in her story Kane has rather boldly fashioned her own novel, speculating on Fitzgerald's inner life and on the odd expat milieu she might have found there (including the painters Edward and Jo Hopper), and tapping into the subtle humor and human yearning that make Fitzgerald's own novels so quietly compelling.