Vanessa Gebbie has created a deep and passionate not to mention humorous story in her stunning debut novel, The Coward’s Tale. Families and generations and individual tragedies are intermingled and come masterfully to life with her literary prowess. So beautiful and tender is her use of language that the name Dickens comes to mind. Gebbie deftly elicits an eerie and mysterious tone in this heart-wrenching tale. At the current time in the story, folks are still recovering from a tragic mining disaster at the Kindly Light Pit, which happened years ago. Many characters’ lives are still shaped by this event, either because they were alive at the time and lost loved ones or because they had past family members who died.

Take Eve Bartholomew, a woman who has lived alone with her mother, “a strange one,” for many years and whose intended is killed in the accident only a few days before they are to be wed. Several evenings later, a neighbor sees Eve wander out to the garden in a soiled nightdress “even though it was not yet night.” She clips “two ragged, late roses” from a thorny bush and doesn’t respond to the neighbor who calls over to see if she is okay. That night she dresses in her wedding gown and veil, both of which she’s been hand sewing in private for months. She walks through the hamlet with her ragged roses in her matrimonial regalia “and for the first time heard laughter in the air, and singing, and the voices of friends, and there were neighbors wishing her well.” Poor Eve is the only one to hear these voices. She approaches the chapel, which has been prepared for the funerals of the miners the next day, steps into the darkened chapel, and sees and hears what she wants to. There is her betrothed, Edward Bartholomew, and they recite “For richer or poorer” and “until death us do part, as if that had not already happened.” “Then she came out of the doors into the dark, as Eve Bartholomew, for that was her name now, was it not, if she had just married Edward Bartholomew?” The rest of her life up to the present is how she lives a haunting double life. We can only hope one built on fantasy is more real to her.

However, there are signs all these years later that the town may finally be recovering from the mining collapse. For instance, of the three generations of Baker Bowens, only two actually bake. The present day Baker Bowen is still called that even though he’s never been near a rolling pin in his life. Instead, he is a fixer of feet—townspeople limp down his hill with warts, bunions, corns, and worse. It was his grandfather, the original Baker Bowen, who was known for his baking finesse. This William was the first in the family to go into the business because his dear friend Benjie Lewis gave him enough money to buy an oven on his wedding day. As time goes by, though, we gradually understand that William has crossed Benjie in a very personal way, so badly that an black curse is visited on him.

Only in the current time, three generations later, does Andrew Bowen, who never intended to cook but keeps his trays of foot instruments—”scissors and tweezers, files and pincers, blades and blade holders, picks and points”—in the old ovens find that there might be a possibility for his family’s redemption.

The mysterious Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins is the town historian and storyteller who weaves these generations of stories together—mysterious because he is also the town beggar and doesn’t seem entirely right in the head. If someone will only give him a toffee, though, he will tell the folks in the village more of what they’ve come to hear: the history of themselves and their ancestors and Kindly Light. Eventually we learn what happened to him, too, what has made him the eerie and unfortunate character he is. His main listener and chronicler is a boy named Laddy Merridew, who has come to stay with his grandmother for a while. Through his unusual teacher, Ianto, he begins to learn far more about the trials and tribulations of human beings than he ever would have staying home with his overly pious granny.

Gebbie’s soulful rendering of this emotionally-tarnished hamlet brings it alive as a favorite character itself so that one can’t help being pleased to see signs of rebirth after its overwhelming tragedy. The love and sympathy Gebbie has for her thoroughly complex and wonderful characters make it the tale it is. This is one of those glorious books that you look forward to coming home and reading every night, one that makes you very sorry when it’s over.