A family full of stories: Those Are Pearls by André Narbonne

One can’t help but feel for Harry Short, the initial protagonist of André Narbonne’s trim yet sweeping historical tale. He can’t catch a break for long. His experiences with the military bookend the novel, but though he survives both, they have troubling consequences.

Pub. by Palimpsest Press (June 2026)

A boilermaker in 1895 South Africa, Harry joins the British on Jameson’s Raid, a foray against the Boers of the Transvaal, even though he knows it’s a “fool’s mission.” He believes he'll have a better chance, as a returning war hero, of winning the hand of Margaret Roll, daughter of a well-off physician in Cape Town.

Margaret, however, doesn’t love him back. Disabled from a childhood accident, she sees marriage to Harry as her ticket away from her controlling father’s uncomfortable treatments. She never forgives him for wanting to make his own way in the world – that is, without her father’s money. Homesteading on the Manitoba prairie, where they settle in 1910 since a colder climate was questionably recommended for Harry’s health, isn’t for the timid. Margaret justifiably feels grumpy about that. Still, Dr. Roll describes her accurately in telling Harry that “she lives her life in grudges.”

Later, as a 45-year-old father of four in Winnipeg, Harry has grown weary of Margaret’s complaints and poor attitude. He enlists to fight overseas in WWI. Pain and secrets ensue.

Some people are driven by duty, others by desire, and some both, depending on the circumstance. Through the Shorts and their progeny, Narbonne takes us through these very human motivations and failings with an expert hand. Spanning three generations, the narrative loops back and forth through time, introducing character after unique character. While their escapades seem tailor-made for fiction, they feel very realistic and are historically based (Harry was the author’s great-grandfather).

Across over eighty years, through the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919 and the Great Depression and after, we experience their adventures, love affairs, tragedies, growing pains, and the varied ways they come to know – or refuse to know – one another.

Thanks to Narbonne’s careful interweaving of timelines, and with the time and place noted at the start of many chapters, the non-chronological structure is less confusing to follow than it sounds. With a few exceptions. Among other perspectives, there are two first-person narrators, Ruth’s sister, Nan, and Ruth’s daughter Margaret – her grandmother’s namesake – and sometimes it’s unclear which of them is speaking.

Through this approach, we’re not only privy to nuggets of family lore shared by Harry’s descendants, but we also see them fleshed out in full scenes, many chapters later. For example, we learn early on that Harry’s son-in-law, Frank Good, abandoned his family by running off with the maid. Seeing firsthand how this transpires brings plenty of interesting surprises.

A Giller Prize longlisted author, Narbonne unfolds the story with pithy observations, references to the classic literature Harry adores, and occasional dry humor, adding insights on the novel’s locales (“In the twenties, Winnipeg was a young adult, brashly uncertain”) and historical events (“The war arrives in absences. As early as 1939, people go missing”). It turns grim in places, true, but is always an involving journey.

Those Are Pearls (you may recognize the title from Shakespeare) was published by Palimpsest Press, an independent press out of Windsor, Ontario, in June 2026.