Adam's Cane

"I didn't see my father again until the morgue yesterday. He looked all right, a little pinker and puffier than usual. Then they closed the lid." For Adam Lamb, this loss is definitely not an existentialist experience. Instead, the funeral guests - who slowly drift in to a service where the pastor's only role is to keep his mouth shut and let the music play - open the lid on his dad's own philosophy. In a tender moment, with the friends, ex-lovers, and colleagues of the late Charley Lamb raising a drink and sharing memories, Adam experiences the peeling back of accumulated years.

...as the evening wore on, all these people around the table, though at least a half a century old - except Barbara Chardon and myself - started looking much younger. I began seeing their faces as if they were the ages they were when all these things happened. Lou-Lou was seventeen. Isabella was twenty-five. Pittet and Danny Dapper were cruising through their forties and fifties. And I was seeing my father through the years after he moved to Switzerland and made a life for himself - both before and after he made me.

But the life-changing surprise for him isn't his dad's colourful past, or the momentary shift in time and space. It's connected to the hand that gently touches his elbow and escorts him to the cemetery, as the moon hangs like a streetlamp over the Alps.

This novel explores the theme of love in a most original way. Ferguson has a unique voice that is unmistakably his own, despite there being echoes of Camus, Maupassant, Proust, Sartre, as well as Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Philosophical and conversational at the same time and, ultimately, deeply moving.