The murder of an elderly former nun at a nursing home, and the discovery of a buried baby’s remains during renovations at a former home for unmarried mothers, takes readers to an island in Puget Sound, in the USA’s Pacific Northwest. Nunn has used the fictional Orcades Island, off the coast of Seattle, as the setting for her latest novel, based on true events.
The cast of characters includes four generations of one family. Ingrid, the matriarch, is a resident in a nursing home on the island, where her daughter, Diana, is renovating the former home for unmarried mothers. Her granddaughter, Frankie, is helping while waiting to start a new job as a deputy sheriff, and Izzy, a great-granddaughter, is visiting.
The novel draws links between the young women, mostly teenagers, who came to Fairmile on the island, a home for ‘fallen women’ run by the Catholic Church, in 1949, and events in 2013. Nunn depicts the nuns at Fairmile as generally dour and forbidding but, surprisingly, as an important part of the plot, she has two of them smoking cigarettes.
The main character in 1949 is a 16-year-old pregnant student from Oregon who is sent to Fairmile by her family and told she will not be welcome at home with her baby. That was a common story at the time, with 1.5 million babies given up for adoption in the USA between 1945 and 1973.
Nunn paints a picture of girls as young as 13 arriving at that island home, given new first names, with surnames never used, and assigned to work duties. Just how that story in 1949 is linked to the 2013 murder of an elderly woman is a mystery to be solved by Frankie, who had worked as a police officer for some years in Australia.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
Read a Q&A with Kayte Nunn about The Last Reunion
Read an article about Katie Nunn and The Silk House
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kayte Nunn is a former book and magazine editor, and the author of six previous novels, including the international bestselling The Botanist’s Daughter, The Forgotten Letters of Esther Durrant, The Silk House and The Last Reunion. The Botanist’s Daughter was the 2020 winner of the Winston Graham Historical Fiction Prize. Kayte lives in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales.
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