Meet me at the museum, by Anne Youngson

A charming epistolary novel in the manner of 84 Charing Cross Road and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Tina Hopgood, a British woman in late middle age, writes to the Aarhus Museum in Denmark where the “Tollund Man” is on display.  P. V. Glob wrote a book called The bog people in 1969 about this amazingly well-preserved Fourth Century BCE specimen and his milieu and she hopes he is still at the museum and can answer a few questions.  They are rather existential questions, having to do, among other things, with her and her best friend’s plans to visit the Tollund Man someday, which has been rendered impossible by her friend’s recent death.  A polite curator replies that Glob died in 1985, but he will try to answer her queries.  And so develops an increasingly intimate conversation between Anders Larsen, the curator, who recently lost his beloved, troubled wife, and Tina, wife of a stolid farmer who she married because she got pregnant at nineteen.  Her life has been full, and not without its pleasures, but it is clear that she is isolated geographically and emotionally and disappointed in more than just not having seen the Tollund Man.  This debut novel by a 70- year-old author gives hope to all late-bloomers.  Lovely book.  272 pp.