Our Better Natures

by Sophie Ward

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

'Ward fleshes out her real-life characters with complete conviction, deftly threading their own words into the fabric of her fiction' FINANCIAL TIMES

'A captivating invocation of a moment of revolutionary zeal and hope . . . a prescient reminder of the importance of testimony in the fight for justice, of individual stories' IRISH EXAMINER

'Our Better Natures is a stunning meditation on hope, its fragile insistence, driven by Sophie Ward's singular wit and astounding philosophical playfulness. It cements Ward's place as one of our most inventive, inquisitive, & alert novelists working today' MARGOT DOUAIHY

'Our Better Natures is potent and beguiling. It makes one see with a better eye' LAURA CARLIN

'Our Better Natures is an absolute marvel - a marvel of ideas, full of intellectual delights; a marvel of construction that propels us toward the most unexpected - and inevitable - outcomes; a marvel of writing, elegant, poised, wise, achingly beautiful at times, but never pulling focus from the stories of the three women and the people around them; and a marvel of compassion. A truly magnificent creation' NANCY CRANE

Amid the chaos and political upheaval of 1970s America, three very different women must accept the world as it is, or act to change it.

Phyllis Patterson is a housewife in White Plains, Illinois. Her son Jimmy returns to the family home from Vietnam with a Korean wife and two children. Blindsided by these new additions, particularly her curious granddaughter, Soozie, Phyllis's small-town world is turned upside down in more ways than she could have ever imagined.

Andrea Dworkin is an activist in Amsterdam. Having fled her abusive husband and their life together, she finds herself desperate for answers, for herself and the world around her. An encounter with Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault at their infamous Dutch debate provokes her burgeoning independence. Returning to America she will embody a revolution, no matter the price.

Muriel Rukeyser is a poet in New York. Despite protestations from her lover, Monica, Muriel insists on campaigning against injustice, using her words as weapons and pushing her body to its limits. In this era of political unrest, Muriel's life stands as a testament to the possibility of creative resistance.

A single postcard from an imprisoned writer thousands of miles away will unite these women in the fight for a world they believe in.

Full of compassion, imagination and rich storytelling, Our Better Natures is a powerful novel about language, connection and freedom.

Release date: February 5, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 75000

Sample

Phyllis watched from the kitchen window as her daughter-in-law stepped over the rolls of dirt. The corn grew close to the back of the house, and Phyllis saw the woman frown and cross the ditches that bordered the field. It wouldn’t hurt her to smile once in a while, she thought. Another beautiful day on God’s green earth, and we’re alive, aren’t we?

Something to be grateful for in this family. Phyllis turned to the pan of boiling fruit on her stove and dug in a spoon before the sides caught. Her only son had made it back from a war. His bride must be happy about that. Luckier than his uncles had been in the last war. Two of the three of them killed, and Reggie with his hearing gone and never the same. You couldn’t compare wars of course, but it was hard not to when the men in your family kept being called upon. Now there was a new generation of boys to worry about. Boyd had told her if America got itself involved in another war, there wouldn’t be any fighting. She knew he meant they’d probably all be dead, not only the men. But that was Boyd. You couldn’t count on him for a conversation, but he liked to make a statement.

She stirred bottled lemon juice into the cooked applesauce and set the jars on the table, ready to be filled. A dozen large jars for the winter, stored alongside the preserved cherries and the rhubarb jams. Soon it would be time to start canning the vegetables. She hoped she could get the oven hot enough. She’d told her Jimmy the door was sticking and wouldn’t close tight, but he’d been busy all week down at the plant and not a moment to himself when he was home. Two young kids and that wife, all needing something.

She wouldn’t let Boyd fix things any more. Only last month, the truck had fallen on him when he’d been lying underneath and he was lucky to get out with bruised ribs. He blamed the tyre jack. Phyllis was counting, though, and that was the third accident this summer. He was the one with the artery trouble but she didn’t think either of their hearts could take much more where that came from. So, she didn’t tell him about the broken oven door, and she would have to wait until Jimmy was home and his father was out before any­thing could be done about it.

There was a time when she would have driven to Clarksville, got out a book and fixed the oven herself. White Plains didn’t have a library unless you counted the community hall by the elementary school, where the children could borrow some of the reference books for their homework projects. Encyclopedias and dictionaries and the like. No manuals, not even recipes or dressmaking, that she remembered. Which was a shame, now she thought about it. Phyllis had gone to school right up to ninth grade, but even if she’d been to college to train as a teacher the way she had wanted, she wouldn’t have learned how to wire up the bathroom so you didn’t electrocute yourself in the shower the first time you tried to use your indoor plumbing. Or what plants kept the pests away from your green beans, and how to set a broken arm, or plan a funeral for your brother or a homecoming for your son who let you know he was married with two kids a month before they all arrived on your doorstep with a few suitcases and an everlasting cough. Phyllis reckoned only books had the answers to those questions. Books on everyday problems and books with stories and poems in them. Not that she had time for stories, but she thought about the ones she read in school often enough.

She dabbed at her top lip with the embroidered cloth she used for holding pans. Outside the window, she saw Jimmy’s wife peel back the tight green leaves on a cob. Phyllis didn’t know if they grew corn in Korea, but it would be no good if the woman trampled all over the field and ate the crop. Even the chickens knew not to do that. The corn did not belong to Phyllis and Boyd anyhow. June had seen where the Pattersons’ yard finished and the MacFarlands’ began. She’d watched Phyllis planting squash along their property line only the week before. Phyllis had looked up to see June staring right at her, like she didn’t think Phyllis was doing it right. I don’t know who she thinks she is, Phyllis had said to her sister Trudy when Trudy called round the next day. She was acting as though she was in charge of me, or something. Don’t be like that, Trudy said. You’ve got to give her a chance. Not that I have much choice, Phyllis said.

She knocked on the glass. The young woman’s hand dropped to her side, still holding tight to the cob, and she took another step into the field. Phyllis wondered if she would walk around all day like that, the size of a bird and about as restless. Maybe she was trying to tell Phyllis she was hungry. She didn’t eat much of any­thing, and that was nobody’s fault but her own.

The first night they arrived, Jimmy’s wife had pushed her food around her plate, even though the meat was store-bought and Phyllis had baked dinner rolls when it was too darn close to spend so much time in the kitchen. There was no pleasing some. Jimmy had asked if his wife could cook for them one of these days. He said she was a good cook. He said it in that way he had of asking her for something special, his hazel eyes wide, looking straight at her. June’s a real good cook, Ma. Phyllis couldn’t help smiling and telling him of course she could. Of course. It would be nice to have some help around the house and some female company too. She’d said that to Jimmy, and she wanted to mean it. But honestly, it just couldn’t work out like that. Not yet anyhow, with the woman speaking almost no English and Lord knows what she would cook. Let her get settled in, Phyllis said a few days later. Let us all get used to the situation, Jimmy. It wasn’t too much to ask.

She shook her head as she turned off the stove and ladled stewed apples into the jars. She didn’t wish the woman any harm. She just couldn’t get comfortable the way she wanted to with her daughter-in-law, however hard she tried. Every morning she woke up with good intentions, but by sundown she was saying her prayers again, trying to keep her patience. Seeing the woman in the cornfield looking so tiny and so miserable was making her temper worse. What was it about some people that brought out the devil in you when all you wanted was to do right?

Soon the children would come home from school and the day would get easier. The noise they made and the trouble they got into. Straight off, the little house would be a home again, the way it had been when Jimmy and his sisters were young. Her mind wandered to the days when Jimmy, Christine and little Val would sit around the table playing cards while she got dinner ready, begging her to join them so they could watch her shuffle the pack and deal hands like she learned when she was at Gillard’s Concrete.

The afternoon sun pushed through the small window and bounced off the glass jars. Phyllis watched the cyclones of dust that circled the kitchen. At Gillard’s the air had been thick with white powder, and you didn’t need any sunlight to see it. You felt the sludge right there in your throat.

She’d only worked at the quarry for two years. Sometime after the young men had gone and the older ones had realised they weren’t coming back for a while, if at all. She’d dragged her heels about going out to work; there was so much to do at home, and her mama would have to mind Jimmy and Christine. Phyllis was older than some of the other women who signed up, and she maybe could have gotten out of it with having two kids and, for some months after Boyd visited home from training, another one on the way. She lost that soul though, and there was a paycheck to think of, excepting it was half what the men had got. There was the chance to stop moping over the dead baby and to spend the days with a few friends in a place that wasn’t thought of as a waste of time or even ‘un-American’, which was what any kind of party or celebration seemed to have become.

Of course, she had been too busy to socialise after work, but in the break the girls got together with their paper-bag lunches. One of them had been a croupier in Las Vegas when the dam was being built. She taught Phyllis and the others what she knew about blackjack and poker, and it had been cards every day for a while. Only for pennies, but she had such memories of her heart racing and her head full of the trick of it all.

The lunches hadn’t seemed so much fun at the time. She was tired with the kids and the manual work at the quarry. There was always worrying about Boyd and her brothers, and money was still tight. But they were the last years she’d really felt young. Even with children and past thirty, there was a carefree turn to her life at work, which she never found again. Probably that was not the way she should remember the wartime. She did, though, and the kids must have picked up on it because they just loved to watch her playing cards and talking about Rita the Croupier, who was covered in clay dust and still able to magic up the glamour of Binion’s Horseshoe in a quarry cafeteria in 1944.

The jars were full and nearly sealed when she heard the screen door at the back of the house slam shut. She guessed they didn’t have screen doors in Korea, but you’d only have to go through one once to know it was on a spring and from then on to take hold of one of the perfectly good handles that Boyd had attached to both sides of the frame and close it yourself before you shook down the whole house.

Phyllis took a breath. She knew how stubborn she was and how it didn’t always pay off. She knew how she could take against a person and long after the argument had ended and everything was made up and laid to rest, she could never really, not truly, forgive them because she couldn’t unlearn what she had found out. And what were you supposed to do about that? Shame on you if you forgot that you were the frog carrying the scorpion across the lake. You’d only go and get stung, and it would be your own darn fault.

Knowing all this, she had been forced to admit, just to herself and late into the night, that this daughter-in-law, this June, had done her no wrong. Not in the ordinary way. And Phyllis didn’t want to think about any other way. How her Christine was behaving for a start. Christine, with a husband safe at home, was sure June was doing wrong just because of where she came from.

No, June was family now, and Phyllis was going to have to go on working at it until the woman felt like family and she could keep her in her prayers along with all the people she liked to remember when she kneeled underneath her relief picture of Jesus after she had settled Boyd down and before she took out her teeth.

‘June?’ Phyllis could hear her hovering in the stairway.

She was sorry Christine didn’t know any better and hadn’t driven down from Elgin to see Jimmy and meet his new family, saying on the phone in the tight little voice she got when she was on her high horse that she wished them well. Jimmy had told Phyllis the whole story, Christine’s awful voice and all. You should understand that, Jimmy, Christine had said. It wouldn’t be right to be introduced to your wife quite yet, what with so many brave soldiers still dying. Whatever that means, Jimmy said when he told the story at dinner, though they all knew full well what it meant.

Phyllis leaned over the table as she clamped down the seals.

‘June. Get in the kitchen and help me fix these jars.’

June came to the doorway and looked around.

‘I’ve got all this to do, and I could use some help.’ Without a hot oven for the processor, Phyllis would have to heat the jars in batches on the stovetop. She had a pan of boiling water ready to go.

June didn’t move.

‘Come on,’ Phyllis beckoned her over with all the patience she could muster and demonstrated the sealing process again. ‘OK?’

June nodded and went to hold the jar.

‘You’ll need this,’ Phyllis said, offering a linen cloth before the woman burned herself. She couldn’t tell if June would have gone ahead and held the jars of boiling applesauce with her bare hands. Her daughter-in-law wasn’t stupid, Phyllis could see that, but she didn’t seem to have as much sense in her head as a daisy. Jimmy had already scolded his mother for talking down to June. She’s a businesswoman, Ma, he’d said. She’s educated.

She closed one more of the lids and watched while June copied her. Neat hands flipped and pressed as quickly as Phyllis could manage. Quicker. June was on to the next jar. Phyllis clenched her fingers and felt for the stiffness that was already coming. She wasn’t quite sixty, but her joints were surely seizing up. She nodded at June and placed the sealed jars in the hot water.

Educated. He hadn’t said it as though Phyllis wasn’t, more as though none of them were, compared to June. Phyllis had felt the hurt, the way Jimmy must have meant her to. She wanted to remind him that it was thanks to her all the children graduated high school, and Jimmy had trained as an engineer in the army. They were a smart family that had gotten through a lot by using what they knew. She tried to remember that Jimmy was a proud husband, and it was only natural he would stand by June and look out for her. She’d raised him to be that way. Still, she wouldn’t have June thinking she’d married down.

Phyllis finished washing the applesauce pan and filled it with water to heat up next to the first one. There had been a boyfriend one time, Chrissie’s, she thought, who’d been over to visit from the University of Illinois. Yes, Chrissie knew the boy from school but he’d gone on seeing her for a while that fall. Her daughter was so pleased that the young man was coming all the way from Champaign-Urbana to see her, and she’d helped Phyllis get the Sunday lunch ready and lay up the table and make everything just about as fancy as the house could be. Over lunch, this boy wanted to make conversation, though that wasn’t the usual way in their home, what with Boyd not being one for too much talk. But the boy went chattering on about the wonderful facilities at U of I and how the library collection was one of the biggest in the world. Val piped up, Mama goes to the library. She has always had her library card. The young man from White Plains, who was tipping cows for a good time only six months before, turned to his girlfriend’s mother with a grin on his teenage face. Oh, really, ma’am, good for you. What are you reading now? And Phyllis said without missing a beat, Finnegan’s Wake, and started to clear the table.

Of course, she was reading no such thing. Phyllis could laugh at her own joke. It was a know-it-all reply she’d seen on Twenty-One and just about the most out-of-the-way book she’d ever heard of. But she’d stored it up and it came in handy that day with Mr University of Illinois. She didn’t know what he said to Christine, but her daughter seemed to have had her fill of him that day and he never did come back. Phyllis was glad at the time, but then Dale turned up and now she thought of it, maybe she should have given college-boy a break. She wouldn’t have picked Dale to be the father of her grandchildren. She didn’t think she’d wish that on any­body.

She’d run out of space to put more on the stovetop, but she reckoned the first batch was ready. She turned off the gas and lifted the heavy pan to the sink. It was easier to fish the jars out from there instead of splashing boiling water all over the floor. But when she turned around, June was at the sink, her hands wrist deep in potatoes. It was all Phyllis could do to heave the pan back onto the stove and not drop it on the floor and scald the both of them.

‘Land sakes!’ Phyllis was flushed with the effort and the near miss. ‘What are you doing? I could’ve killed you.’

June had stepped back and was staring at Phyllis. She didn’t say a word. Phyllis thought she was looking at her like she was a dangerous animal. It made her want to shout. Or run at her. Both at the same time. She didn’t know why, and it would only have proved June right, but she wasn’t the one who had got in the way and started washing potatoes without being asked. It was Phyllis’s kitchen, and in her kitchen you did what she told you to do.

‘I could’ve killed you,’ she said again.

June nodded.

Phyllis looked at the potatoes. They were the ones she had got out of the shed for dinner that night. The same way she did every day when they had potatoes that needed eating. June was preparing dinner the way she had seen her mother-in-law doing. Looking at the potatoes made Phyllis feel a different kind of anger. The kind of anger like a stone in your stomach. She knew it for what it was, and it was a bad feeling, but that stone kept coming back ever since Jimmy brought June home. She had asked June into the kitchen to help, and June was helping, and still Phyllis wanted to shout at her. Maybe Christine was right, maybe there was something bigger than what Jimmy wanted, and being a good mother. A bigger situation altogether than what Phyllis was used to, and no amount of praying to the baby Jesus would make it better.

She pointed at June to move the potatoes. Jimmy had told her that they didn’t eat potatoes in Korea; that June and her family ate rice instead. Phyllis had tried not to judge. She knew how to make rice, and one day soon she would go to Krogers and buy some rice and cook it. She hadn’t had a chance to do that yet, but she had planned the whole thing. That showed she was trying. Rice didn’t have any­thing to do with potatoes as far as she could see, but she listened to Jimmy. Probably, the kids would like it if she made some rice too. They would be used to it, she guessed.

Phyllis didn’t like to think too much about what kind of life Jimmy’s children had before they moved to Illinois. Jimmy said it was swell, and June’s family had a big house with people who worked for them, but Phyllis couldn’t imagine everyone looking like June and not speaking English and those kids in the middle of it all. And a war going on, Jimmy, she’d said when everyone else had gone to bed one night; you should have brought them here in the first place. That’s in Vietnam, Jimmy said. My base is in Korea. It’s a different country. Phyllis knew that perfectly well, but there had been a war in Korea not so long ago and who was to say what might happen? Her grandchildren were born on a US army base thousands of miles away. It troubled Phyllis to think of it.

‘Put them in the bowl.’ Phyllis watched June scooping the potatoes out of the sink and putting them on the side one by one. Both the big saucepans were full of jars. At this rate, the applesauce would set like toffee. She lifted the pan back to the sink, shouted ‘Hot water!’ and held on to the top of the jars with a cloth while they drained. Only as she saw the steam rise from the basin did she remember that she should have saved the hot water to cook the potatoes.

Nothing made sense any more.

June had found a bowl and was waiting for her next instruction. Without a word, Phyllis took the bowl out of her hands and set it on the table, grabbed the potato peeler from the drawer, raised it in the air before June, and put it next to the bowl. It took all Phyllis had not to throw the whole darn lot on the floor. But June just nodded, pulled out a chair, and without a word, began to peel.

Phyllis turned back to the stove and took the next pan over to the sink. She lifted the jars one by one and this time remembered to leave the water in for the vegetables. The stone in her stomach was still there, heavy and sour. Like the time in middle school when she saw Greg Osterhuber kick a puppy. Greg’s brother Pete had scored a home run in the seventh inning at the local baseball game and Phyllis shared a ride home with his family. She watched Mr Osterhuber lean back from the driver’s seat and ruffle the top of Pete’s head with a big grin and Pete’s brother had sure seen it too. Phyllis knew that’s why Greg kicked the Osterhubers’ puppy when they all got out of the car, even though he loved that puppy and there would certainly be no head ruffle from his dad. Greg Osterhuber had a stone in his stomach just the same as Phyllis did now, excepting who was the puppy and who was Pete and, come to that, who was Pete’s dad, she wasn’t sure.

The dogs were barking outside. That meant the kids would be coming through the door in five minutes. Most of the folks in White Plains had a dog, and they all barked when the school bus pulled into Vandalia Street. What with the roosters and the dogs, the trucks going back and forth to the quarry, or the paint factory, o. . .