Her Decision

Addicted as I am to scanning death notices, I was only a few pages into Ten Clear Days when I put the book down to search the internet for information on Marianne Judith Manoville Beck, the octogenarian whose life and death are at the heart of her grandson Eric Beck Rubin’s second novel. The notice was brief, saying only that she had died in 2018 at Sunnybrook Hospital, in Toronto, surrounded by family. Then it named her husband of sixty-five years, H. Thomas Beck, who had predeceased her in 2016; it listed their descendants; and it noted their favoured charities: the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. There was no mention of the Holocaust or of MAID, two defining events both in her life and in this evocative and compelling story.

Beck’s debut novel, School of Velocity, which was included in the Guardian’s 2016 roundup of best books, was about friendship and rivalry. This equally spare and dramatic...