Peripheral Vision

Synopsis

Sylvia, a young, highly competent eye surgeon in 1990s London, stumbles into love and motherhood and discovers she is terrified of both. Ruby, a 1950s suburban housewife, begins receiving poison pen letters; her interior life is so distorted by rage and shame that she actually believes she deserves them. Iris, the gentle young nurse who attends to Ruby's son after an accident, falls in love with a handsome, upper-middle-class medical student. But Iris is working class and will have to overcome forces of snobbery to achieve the safety and love she so desperately craves. Over the course of this gripping, intricately plotted story, the subtle connections between these three women are gradually and surprisingly revealed as Ferguson masterfully illustrates the role random fate plays in human life.

Peripheral Vision is a funny and clever novel about love and the lack of it; about motherhood, sight, and insight; and about the different ways we experience and transcend suffering.

Publishers Weekly

The aftermath of a child's injury leaves a trail of love, loss and mystery around generations of women in British author-and former nurse-Ferguson's finely wrought American debut. After an accident in 1953 threatens a young boy named George with blindness, his mother, Ruby, becomes the target of an anonymous, vicious letter-writer and begins to lose her grip on reality. Meanwhile a young nurse and a medical student meet while sitting over George's hospital bed and begin an all-consuming romance. Their happy courtship worries working-class nurse Iris when she enters her boyfriend Rob's posh and unwelcoming world. Forty years later, Sylvia, a talented London eye surgeon reads the crumbling old hospital notes detailing George's surgery and must confront her lack of inner vision when it comes to her new child, her family and a life-long friendship. Ferguson does a beautiful job of drawing together the pieces-the relationship between our physical and moral ailments, and injuries with our inner pain and suffering-and her nonlinear storytelling builds a sense of foreboding, mystery and pathos as the fates of all these characters' interlocking lives are revealed. (Oct.)