By Tracy Chevalier
HarperFiction, £14.99
Robert Goodenough, earthy hero of Tracy Chevalier's latest novel, is fired by dreams of the Golden Pippin, the sweet apple his father loved so consumingly - and lost. In his pursuit of it across America, Robert "had been thrown in jail and hidden from Indians and almost drowned crossing rivers and being stalked by wolves and wildcats."
This is tough pioneer stuff, far removed from the Delft palette of Vermeer, finessed in Chevalier's most lauded work, Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Chevalier's historical fiction ranges rich and wide - other titles unearth the Dorset fossils of Mary Anning, unstitch the great French 15th-century Lady and the Unicorn tapissiers and champion the cause of slave-freeing Quakers from Ohio. Chevalier never fails to touch, impassion and inspire with her sweeping imagination and remarkably researched tales of times past, shaped by the real-life visionaries to whom she gives voice.
At the Edge of the Orchard returns to Ohio for its opening chapters - to its black, life-sucking swamps. Here, in the 19th century, enterprising folk, prospecting for land they could claim by planting 50 fruit trees, were forced to settle. Their wagons became stuck in the mud and would go no further.
Chevalier paints a grim picture of the Goodenoughs' thankless graft, the loss of half their 10-strong brood to summer swamp fever, the bible-bashing prayer meetings offering rare distraction, and the seething hostility that sets parents Sadie and James Goodenough against each other.
The couple clash violently over which variety of apple to grow: James prizes the hard-to-cultivate English Pippin tasting of nuts and honey "with a pineapple finish". Sadie seeks escape in drink - the potent applejack pressed from bitter fruit "spitters". Jonny Appleseed, in real life a kindly frontier nurseryman peddling his seedlings and saplings to the Ohio community, is here the serpent agent of Sadie's intoxication.
When the family falls apart, Robert makes his own way through a mélange of quack medicine sales, mining, ranch and stable work. Newly literate, he writes home, letters that may, or may never be read.
Chevalier suggests the impossibility of even such a decent, honourable man really living up to his name. But, thanks to a chance encounter: seeking out and marvelling at a forest of great pines and giant sequoias, Robert becomes the aide of another real-life figure of early transatlantic tree trade - English plant hunter William Lobb.
Now, the Goodenough apple can fall farther from the tree than he ever envisaged and, as the narrative (mostly beautiful, occasionally burlesque) ripens, the fruits of family, love, letters and labour come together in a harvest of some loss and much hope. Chevalier celebrates the apple's glory; readers will never again peel a Pippin heedlessly.
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance writer