Annabel

Annabel - A Novel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape, 2010), 457 pages
* SPOILER ALERT*

What a beautiful and strange book this is ... A baby is born with both male and female genitalia in the small town of Croydon Harbour in Labrador in 1968. He is a hermaphrodite (now referred to as the more politically correct "intersex"). The doctors decide that s/he is sufficiently male that s/he should assume a male identity - aside from the doctors only the parents, Jacinta and Treadway, and the midwife Thomasina, know the baby's secret. The child himself has no knowledge of why he is different, he only knows that he is. A simple operation while he is a baby literally seals his fate. They call him Wayne.

Thomasina, after a personal tragedy in which she loses her daughter who is named Annabel, secretly names little Wayne "Annabel". Thomasina soon leaves Labrador and pursues a life away in Europe away  from her cloistered, narrow-minded community sending postcards of bridges to Wayne (a metaphor for Wayne's halfway state between male and female?). She studies to be a teacher and will soon return to Croydon Harbour.