THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S WIFE

With her Kodak Eastman camera and her fountain pen, 11-year-old Prudence Ashton is quite the little detective in Jerusalem, 1920. Buoyed that she was “sent for” from England to join her architect father Charles Ashton, she devours the secret codes Arabic teacher Ihsan Tameri teaches her. Joinson’s second novel is an achingly beautiful yet also brutally violent snapshot: seen through Prue’s eyes, we focus on Arab photographer Khaled Rasul’s glamorous English wife, Eleanora. Pals Prue and Eleanora were “tramps with cameras”, until Flight Lieutenant William Harrington landed to envision Charles’ plans to aesthetically redesign the Holy City. Yet Willie and Eleanora have a history and “silly girl” Prue is abandoned. When Ihsan mysteriously asks her to follow the couple, Prue “folded herself quite neatly, cleverly, into a Bedouin rug hanging for sale. When she stepped out they had gone deep into the souk.” At 28, divorcée sculptress Prue, her son and her lover live shabbily in West Sussex. When a “journalist” knocks on her door, the truth about British treachery, Arab terrorism and the secrets of the characters from her lonely childhood shall flicker.