The Book of Eve by Constance Beresford-Howe

And the Canadian reading continues! I read The Book of Eve (1973) by Constance Beresford-Howe on the plane home from Canada having picked it up in Fair’s Fair in Calgary. It was one of the bookshops that very considerately had bookcases dedicated to Canadian authors, and I spent a good while going through an awful lot of promising-looking books. I’d never heard of this author or title, but it had the magical words ‘boarding house’ in the blurb – and that was enough to swing it for me. Here is the opening paragraph: The real surprise – to me anyway – was not really what I did, but how I felt afterwards. Shocked, of course. But not guilty. You might say, and be right, that the very least a woman can be is shocked when she walks out on a sick and blameless husband after forty years. But to feel no guilt at all – feel nothing, in fact, but simple relief and pleasure – that did seem odd, to say the least. How annoying for God (not to mention Adam), after all, if Eve had just walked out of…