Those are Pearls

Twenty-five years in the making, Those Are Pearls is an inter-generational novel that follows a family swept into the currents of history and the horrors of their own lives. The Shakespearean title evokes the novel’s preoccupation with the strange beauty and complexity that can emerge from lives shaped by forces larger than themselves. Published by Palimpsest Press in June 2026, the novel brings together the inner conflicts of one family and the sweeping movements of history that force characters to be pushed together and pulled apart. 

The origins of André Narbonne’s novel lie in years of research into his own family history; one of its main characters is his great-great-grandfather. An expansive work of historical fiction spanning continents and nearly a century, Those Are Pearls made me think of Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974), another multigenerational Canadian novel in which family history, ancestry and place converge. Like Laurence, Narbonne treats history not simply as a backdrop but as a force that shapes the intimate lives of individuals, revealing how the past continues to inhabit the present. While Laurence’s fictional Manawaka transforms the Manitoba prairie into a landscape of memory and identity, Narbonne similarly situates personal and familial histories within the vastness of the Canadian landscape. In both novels, the prairie becomes more than a geographical setting. It is an archive of lives, losses, migrations and inherited histories, contributing to a distinctly Canadian literary tradition in which place becomes inseparable from the formation of identity. 

Beginning in the final years of the nineteenth century and extending to 1977, the novel follows the Short family as private desires become entangled with the larger forces of war, migration and historical change. Narbonne’s historical canvas is vast, but his focus remains intimate and precise. The passions, ambitions and disappointments that shape the lives of one decidedly complicated and utterly human family.

The story opens in South Africa in 1895, where Harry Short, a boilermaker and independent-minded reader of poetry, joins the British forces on the ill-fated Jameson Raid against the Boers of the Transvaal. Harry recognizes the expedition as a ‘fool’s mission,’ yet his motives are driven by romance and imperial duty. 

He imagines that returning as a war hero might improve his chances of winning over Margaret Roll, the daughter of a wealthy Cape Town physician. In Harry, Narbonne creates an appealing contradiction, an unexpected romantic and an independent thinker whose idealism leads him into the machinery of empire. His pursuit of Margaret consumes the focus of the beginning of the novel. 

Narbonne structures this family saga around six principal characters. There are Harry and Margaret, their daughters Ruth and Nan, Ruth’s first husband Frank Good, and their daughter Margaret. Divided into three sections, “Duty,” “Education,” and “Accidents of Necessity,” the novel moves through the family’s variant narrative point-of-view that spans time and geography. 

Each section reflects the forces suggested by its title while revealing how little control individuals ultimately possess over the conditions into which they are born. What begins with Harry’s romantic pursuit in colonial South Africa gradually expands into a multigenerational saga. 

A family of grit, Narbonne pulls through to shine light in the grotto of each character’s darkness, silver linings vein through. Death does not mean ending, as each character orbits one another even beyond the horror of their domestic tragedies. Love is duty and survival is enduring hard lives. Margaret Good, granddaughter of Harry and Margret, defines family, “my mother and grandmother believed in duty…I can find her offering no love…It’s her duty to raise me, my duty to be raised.” Duty replaces love. A moment that resonated with me was conveyed by this granddaughter Margaret, “just before my mother died, I told her how lucky we were to admire rather than fear a storm, and I recalled our wait in the old Ford. I didn’t think my mother ever lied to me. She was hard at times, but I thought she would never lie. She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I was afraid.’” So, explicit actions are not always what they appear to be, there are plotlines currenting beneath the surface. 

Narbonne traces duality. “Their first home in Canada was pure freedom. Harry worked the land and saw his efforts rewarded with space. He imagined himself pushing disorder away from their door.” Margaret, however, is unhappy, she struggles to endure this transplantation of her family from the Old World to the desolation and poverty of the Canadian prairies. In turn, “their first home in Canada was a prison with rough walls.” Suspense is established as a slow-burning ember and I held on. 

What will become of them? 

Those Are Pearls draws directly on one of Shakespeare’s most haunting images from The Tempest. “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” In Shakespeare’s song, Ariel describes the supposed death of Ferdinand’s father, imagining the drowned body transformed by the sea, bones becoming coral and eyes becoming pearls. The image turns mortality into transformation, suggesting that what is lost can nevertheless become something preserved and capable of enduring beyond the life of the person who possessed it. 

This allusion becomes poignant in Narbonne’s novel because Those Are Pearls itself emerges from family memory and the transformation of lived experience into story. Narbonne has explained that the novel began with a series of emails to his mother about her childhood during the Great Depression and that the resulting work is ‘almost entirely true.’ What begins as recollection becomes fiction, just as Shakespeare’s dead body becomes something transformed by the sea. Narbonne gathers the fragments of family history, Harry Short’s courtship of Margaret Roll, the Boer War and First World War, prairie homesteading, the Winnipeg Riot, the Great Flood of 1950 and the lives of subsequent generations, and turns them into a literary inheritance spanning more than a century. 

The Shakespearean reference therefore gives the title an especially rich metaphorical dimension. The pearls are not simply precious objects, they are what remains. The novel becomes a kind of literary vortex in which individual lives are submerged, separated from their original circumstances and reassembled into something that can be carried forward. This imagery is appropriate for a book whose characters move across continents and generations. 

André Narbonne is a scholar, writer, editor, and publisher based in Windsor, Ontario, whose literary career spans short fiction, poetry, novels, and independent publishing. His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and has received the FreeFall Literary Contest, David Adams Richards Prize, and Atlantic Writing Contest. His first collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight (2016), was shortlisted for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, while his debut novel, Lucien & Olivia (2021), was long-listed for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Before turning to literature and academia, Narbonne worked as a marine engineer, an experience that brought him years at sea and an enduring relationship with questions of isolation, geography, memory, and human connection.

Based in Windsor, Narbonne now teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor and is also the publisher of Conspiracy Press, an independent press he founded to support literary work with high artistic standards and an unconventional spirit. His own writing similarly moves across geographical and generational boundaries, bringing intimate lives into conversation with larger histories.

Palimpsest Press provides an especially fitting home for Those Are Pearls, a multigenerational novel in which private lives accumulate into the larger palimpsest of Canadian and world history. The Windsor-based independent press publishes poetry, literary fiction, and nonfiction with an emphasis on precise language, strong voices, rich imagery, and carefully developed characters, while describing its books as objects of both literary and physical beauty. Narbonne’s novel embodies that mandate through its sweeping movement across generations, continents, and historical upheavals, beginning with Harry Short and Margaret Roll and carrying their family through the Boer War, prairie homesteading, the Winnipeg Riot, the Great Flood of 1950, and the ordinary catastrophes of marriage and family life.

Narbonne submerged the reader in the horrors of war and the effects that war had on the men returning home. “The war had ended the year before, my father’s part much earlier. He had come home in 1916, horribly injured in subtle ways. The trenches had snapped his humour the way they’d taken his easy step.” Harry, having been released from the war early, nearly died of trench foot. “Father came back a quiet man. He would not speak about the war. When he unpacked his duffle bag into the same dresser he’d packed it from two  years earlier, Thomas asked how many Germans he’d killed….My father replied that he hoped he had killed no one.” The conversation follows:

“What was it like?” 

“Do you know what hell is?

“Seperation from God.” We had a sound education in damnation.” 

“Mother, who sat in the same chair performing the same task she’d busied herself with when Harry left, lifted her eyes from her needles. Gazing at the ceiling, she pronounced, ‘And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.’” 

Hell is layered in various forms. The haunting of trench foot. The haunting of survival on the prairies. The haunting of a station in life and acts of betrayals. “Trench foot: At first Father hobbled on crutches, his feet open wounds. Mother raged at his indolence. At eleven a.m., Harry quit whatever diversion or house repair had possessed him and made his way to the front porch where he sat until lunch. It was a daily fix.” Harry cannot provide for his family this way, and Margaret, having grown up in comfort, must endure poverty. “In 1918, when his feet allowed him, Father fed the stove his crutches and returned to his job at Dominion Bridge. He didn’t say anything about his feet, about his pain. But our games became subdued at home, and he did not run.” A father quietly taken from his children in ways unseen, held fast to hope and passion through his love of literature. These quiet dimensions of Harry’s character enabled a holding on, perseverance. 

One of the most memorable quotations, for me, came from Harry in his recollection of a conversation and secret love he had with a woman while he was away at war. This love reveals the character’s aptitude for literature. Harry says, “the best romances in fiction are the ones that never happen.” Much is carved out in what could never happen, and this negative space makes this novel poignant. “Maybe heroism in an age lacking in noble purpose, was only the accidental product of necessity. Perhaps love, too.” 

Thank you to André Narbonne, Palimpsest Press and River Street Writing for a complimentary copy in request for an honest review.