Emma Stonex’s first novel The Lamplighters put a new spin on a true story. Her follow up, The Sunshine Man, is not quite based on a true story but is based on real places and real events. As with her first book Stonex captures the atmosphere and the people to bring these places and events to tragically life.
The Sunshine Man opens in 1989. Bridie wakes up one morning and makes her preparations to kill a man. That man, Jimmy Maguire, was sent to prison eighteen years before for killing her sister and is being released that day. Despite her marriage and two children, Bridie is determined to kill Jimmy in revenge. She takes a gun, leaves a note and sets out to find Jimmy. Meanwhile, Jimmy, who claimed the murder was the work of his friend Floyd, is met from the prison by a grown daughter who he hardly knows who drives him around the country to see his family and visit old haunts.
Stonex is doing a lot in this novel. Through her two main characters she charts a pair of hardscabble, tough childhoods in a depressed part of the UK. Bridie was abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandmother, while Jimmy was part of a poor family with a bad reputation, always hassled by police and almost forced into a life of crime. But Stonex also explores Jimmy’s time in prison, and in particular, the work at HM Prison Grendon, an experimental psychiatric prison established to treat mentally ill patients. And then there are the overarching humanistic considerations of revenge, dealing with grief and tragedy, forgiveness and redemption all baked in.
While there is tragedy baked into the premise of this book, it is also in many ways optimistic. Stonex is ultimately interested in the way we can overcome our pasts, and in doing so, change and move into the future. Taken all together, The Sunshine Man is another resonant, atmospheric novel with plenty for readers to think about.
The Sunshine Man by Emma Stonex
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