The Faraway Bride

Published in Britain as ‘Tobit Transplanted,’ this late novel by Stella Benson carries the apocryphal Book of Tobit into a settlement of White Russian refugees scattered across the far edge of Manchuria. Benson knew that world at first hand from her years in China, and she writes its exiles with sharp sympathy: people stranded by revolution, marrying and quarrelling and improvising lives in a country not their own. The ancient marriage story of Tobias and Sara becomes, in her telling, a study of displacement and endurance shot through with dry wit. The book won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize and stands among her finest work. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.