![]() Some kids would jump on their bikes and be out of there at such an invitation but in Hoffman's stories, 10-year-old boys are wise and curious spirits, part of a symbolic lexicon including red shoes ("always the mark of a witch"), fireflies, bluefish and a white blackbird that tie her tales together. "I'll show you how to make turnip chutney," she tells a sceptical 10-year-old boy who comes by to play in the tangled yard. She is divorced, childless and bereft but finding some stubby wild turnips, the tenacious descendants of those planted two centuries before, gives her the determination to renew her ripped-up life. In the last story, "Wish You Were Here", cancer survivor Emma comes to the farmhouse on midsummer's night ("when you become who you really are") in the 1990s. ![]() The turnip crop provides her with income, and serves as an emblem of grief and renewal "people said they were so sweet a single bite could bring a man to tears". After John and his two young sons are lost in a May gale at sea, his widow Coral turns her back on the ocean, and plants turnips alongside acres of sweet-peas "strong as weeds" in the farm he has built for her. ![]() In the first story, "The Edge of the World", set during the British blockade of the Cape just after the American revolution, fisherman John Hadley becomes "fascinated with turnips, how hardy they were, how easy to grow, even in sandy soil". ![]()
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