Rebecca Schwart’s parents and two older brothers flee Nazi Germany for America in the late 1930s; Rebecca is born on the boat. Growing up in America, Rebecca and her family experience prejudice for their Jewishness, their foreignness. Her father can only find work as the local gravedigger, an indignity which plays on his mind with tragic results. Later years follow Rebecca through adoption by a local woman, work, a short-lived marriage which results in a son – and flight under a false name. Throughout her life Rebecca is looking for a place in life to call her own. With the aid of her son’s unexpected musical talent, maybe she finds it.

After the disappointing ‘Mother, Missing’ (‘Missing Mom’ in the USA) and the compelling if a little slight ‘Black Girl/White Girl’ (both reviewed by me elsewhere on this site), ‘The Gravedigger’s Daughter’ finds Oates on top form. Her writing – expansive and flexible, though more tightly controlled than it may first appear – carries us along in a headlong rush. Scene after scene is brought vividly to life, though some describe things we might rather not look at. Oates doesn’t spare us the darker side of life, and even a sequence describing her work as a chambermaid makes for discomfiting reading.

The novel is a little too inconclusive, ending with an epilogue of letters between Rebecca and another immigrant, a long-lost cousin. Though perhaps these end Rebecca’s story on a note of peace and grace.

Gary Couzens was born in 1964 and lives and works in Aldershot. He has had twenty short stories accepted by F&SF, Interzone, The Third Alternative, Peeping Tom and other magazines, plus a large number of articles and reviews in The British Fantasy Society Newsletter, Zene and elsewhere. He has three novels in varying stages of completeness and has just started his fourth.