The Woman in the Sable Coat

On a ship crossing the Atlantic, a woman in a sable coat contemplates suicide as she looks back over her life. In flashbacks, listeners learn about Nina, who grew up in a small English village with her widowed father, Henry. She first meets Guy at a dinner party and harbors a secret crush on him for years. Years later, after World War II breaks out, she meets him again, but by now he is married and expecting his first child with Kate. Even so, he and Nina embark on a tenuous wartime affair. At the end of the war, Guy divorces Kate and abandons his son so he can marry Nina. Morally upright Henry disowns Nina, after which Guy convinces her to leave England and start a new life in Canada. Nina reluctantly agrees, only to return after realizing she is ill-suited to life as a farmer’s wife. Brooks (The Whispering House) captures the moral climate of the time and the social changes that the war brings. Esther Wane narrates effectively, bringing out the emotional events that shape the lives of Nina and Kate.