Ann Packer’s latest novel, “Some Bright Nowhere,” explores the unexpected rupture that a terminal cancer diagnosis causes in a long and happy marriage.
Now unjustly overlooked, “The Ha-Ha” is the prizewinning first novel by Jennifer Dawson, an accomplished mid-20th-century chronicler of women and madness.
A novelist and biographer, she was also a preservationist, and her meticulous investigations of houses, villages and cities revealed intricate histories.