Hush, Little Baby

Ten-year-old, bespectacled Eira Morgan is burdened with both an eye patch and a charismatic, exotic older half-sister, Phyllis. Along with their asthmatic younger brother, David, the sisters spend a transformative summer in the English countryside with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Huw while their parents study birds in Fiji. Davies's uneven second novel (after The Madness of Love ) cuts back and forth between that summer and Eira's lonely present: she's 36, lives by herself, pines for her married boss at the museum where she works and fantasizes about getting married and having a baby. One day she discovers an abandoned baby in a box on the museum's steps and delivers the foundling to the nearest hospital—then finds herself bereft and flashing back to the summer when she discovered anorexic Phyllis was having an affair with Aunt Maggie and Uncle Huw's boarder, Edward Furnace. Phyllis, of course, becomes pregnant, and things end tragically after Eira interferes. The flashbacks are satisfying and lushly atmospheric, but the adult Eira plot lacks momentum, and she amounts to little more than her description of herself as "the sad woman with the green dress and the bright red lips." (Dec.)