cover image Holding on

Holding on

Mervyn Jones. Eland, $23.95 (310pp) ISBN 978-0-907871-56-9

This saga of three generations of the Wheelwright family of East End London begins at the turn of the century when Dora and Jack Wheelwright move to Steadman Street. They have been married six months and she is nearly nine months pregnant. Soon come children, two world wars, dockyard strikes, unions of love and necessity. The family becomes entangled with Italian immigrants, middle-class people, landed gentry and a Jew. At the end of the novel, Dora and Jack's aging son contemplates the fate of his home and the strangeness of the 1960s. Sadly, Jones makes the Wheelwrights' story as ordinary as real life but much less memorable. (April)