Anna Solomon grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts at the end of a long dirt driveway in the middle of the woods. Below her house was a large field with a few pear trees in it which always seemed to disappear just as they were ripening. Solomon laughs, “My father used to joke that giraffes came in the night to steal the pears.”

This vision of mysterious pear thieves lingered in Solomon’s imagination for years to come. She uses the idea to set the plot of her latest novel into motion. The result is Leaving Lucy Pear, a skillfully constructed novel which tells the story of two very different women linked to a young girl named Lucy Pear. Solomon uses her “intimate sensory relationship” with her hometown to paint a very visceral picture of Prohibition-era Gloucester.

Beatrice Haven is the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. A gifted pianist on her way to Radcliffe College, she finds herself pregnant and unwed. She retreats in shame to her uncle’s summer home on Cape Ann. Bea is unwilling to give her child to an orphanage, so she leaves the infant under a pear tree to be found by the family of thieves who come each year under cover of darkness to strip the orchard of its fruit.  

The consequences of Bea’s decision are long-lasting to both herself and to Emma Murphy, the woman who adopts Lucy Pear despite already having nine children of her own. The daughter of Irish-Catholic immigrants, Emma deals with an unreliable husband, a meager income, and her own questionable desires. When a rum-runner and manager of the local quarry brings the two women together, each grapples with secrets from their past that could derail Lucy Pear’s future.

Leaving Lucy Pear is ultimately a story about motherhood; the desire for it, the absence of it, and the choices you make when raising a child. The mother of an eight-year-old girl and four-year-old boy, Solomon says that she wouldn’t “have been able to depict the complexity of motherhood” without her own personal parenting experiences.

Though set in the past, the author manages to make Leaving Lucy Pear feel very personal and relevant to the modern day. During her extensive research into the Prohibition era, Solomon was surprised at how “virulently nativist [the country] was at the time” and how it had a “resonance to the mood of today.” Fans of historical fiction will appreciate the realistic depiction of the era and readers who like complicated relationship stories will revel in the incisively written characters.

Anna Solomon is a graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of The Little Bride, editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today’s Best Women Writers and winner of two Pushcart Prizes for her short fiction.

The author will  be appearing at Books On the Square in Providence, Rhode Island on Saturday, July 30 at 7 p.m. and Partners Village Store in Westport, Massachusetts on Sunday, August 7 at 4 p.m. Go to annasolomon.com for a complete listing of her events.

Laura LaTour is an avid reader, a former bookseller and author-events coordinator, and is currently working as a freelance writer and publicist. Drop her a line, and tell her what you are reading: Laura@LaTourCreations.com.