A Year of Marvelous Ways by Sarah Winman
Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons
Publication date: June 16, 2026
Genres: Fiction, Historical, Literary, Magical Realism 
Bookshop
Marvelous Ways is a 90-year-old woman living in a camper in Cornwall, England. It’s 1947 and what was once a vibrant small town has dwindled to closed up shops and a few stray residents. And yet, Marvelous sits at the crossroads near her home every day, waiting. For what or for whom she doesn’t know, only that she must wait. This singular woman and her monastic life will come to be redefined by the surprising events that occur in Sarah Winman’s A Year of Marvelous Ways.
Very few people pass through the hamlet where Marvelous has spent most of her life. She was a midwife and a healer and now spends most of her days swimming or rowing in the waters around her home. Water is her joy even as it takes as easily as it gives. It’s on the banks of a small creek that she discovers a young man desperately sick in body and spirit. His name is Francis Drake, a soldier left emotionally scarred by WWII and the death of a woman he loved. Before he left the battlefields of France to return home he promised a dying stranger that he would personally deliver a letter to the man’s father back in Cornwall. Marvelous takes him to her boathouse, a building she padlocked 25 years ago after the death of her beloved. There she slowly nurses him back to health.
With the two narrators in place A Year of Marvelous Ways glides back and forth between the past and the present of, not only their lives, but of those significant to them. It’s a lovely meandering story that reads almost like a fairytale in its movement between the mundane and the otherworldly. The story is something gentle that flows, that lives in the liminal space between the hardness of the real world and the magic of nature and emotion.
Winman’s ability to laser in on the smallest detail and render it with poetic precision mean that expression and emotion are part of every sentence. A breath, a shadow, the wind, a ripple of water. Everything from the smallest sound to the biggest emotion transports the reader into the world she’s created.
A Year of Marvelous Ways is wonderful reading for anyone looking for something quieter, kinder, and wide ranging. There are no straight lines between Marvelous and Francis. What there is, is Marvelous’s life, how she and Drake bond, and that what seem to be random loops and swirls in two separate lives come together in an achingly beautiful ending.
This post contains affiliate links which means if you click on a link and make a purchase, I get a small commission (at no cost to you).
*I received a free copy of this book from G.P. Putnam & Sons in exchange for an honest review.*
Leave a Reply