From blue to pink: Looking for Eliza, by Leaf Arbuthnot, reviewed

On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman in his late eighties, taking the air on his doorstep. I stand behind the area railings and shout: ‘How are you?’ And he shouts back: ‘Bored!’ At least not lonely. His sixtysomething son is with him. But how solitary these lockdown weeks have been for the widow and the widower, the singleton and the bachelor.

Leaf Arbuthnot, a freelance journalist, could not have picked an apter time to publish her first novel Looking for Eliza, a redemptive story about grief, isolation and why everybody needs good neighbours. Its 75-year-old heroine Ada is a poet of the Wendy Cope school. Her subjects are birds, rivers, Oxford and her late husband Michael, an Italian literature don. Ada is out of fashion:

I’m not sure readers want bags like me. They want photogenic graduates from East Anglia with tattoos and attitude, writing about — I don’t know, takeaways, multi-culturalism, sexual assault.