A Single Rose

Rose has grown up without knowing her father. But after her fortieth birthday, she receives an unexpected invitation: a lawyer managing her father’s estate asks her to come to Kyoto, Japan, for the reading of her father’s will. Unbeknownst to Rose, her father has had her in his mind for all these years. To help her navigate the unfamiliar country and culture, her father had arranged for his assistant, Paul, to be her guide. Paul is a devoted companion, showing her the sights and offering information about the father she never knew. She’d spent her life resenting his absence, but now she gains details to fill in the blanks of the kind of man her father was. As she explores this new emotional territory, she finds her relationship with Paul changes as well, opening up new possibilities for her life that she never had imagined.

A Single Rose is as much a story of a woman’s midlife reassessments as it is a love letter to Kyoto, and though the novel is slim, Barbery offers lush descriptions of the city, its people, and its traditions. Love is complex; but Rose comes to see that it is also, surprisingly, simple. It is a lesson worth more than any of the offerings bestowed to her in her father’s will.