Featured image: The Spoon Stealer is set on a farm in Nova Scotia, Canada| Photo from Envato by wirestock

Set in Nova Scotia and England, “The Spoon Stealer” is full of heart

by Carolyn Ray

Canadian Lesley Crewe is the Globe and Mail–bestselling author of 13 novels, including The Spoon Stealer, longlisted for Canada Reads 2022. Set in Nova Scotia in 1984, The Spoon Stealer begins on a summer morning in 1894 when Emmeline’s pregnant mother is hanging out a line of clothes. Emmeline arrives suddenly, dropping “into a basket full of freshly laundered linen.”  The storyline that follows is one that many us can relate to — the idea of belonging, and the impact that family (in particular, our mothers) can have on our lives. Even as a young child, Emmeline never quite feels like she fits in on her family’s rural Nova Scotian farm.

When her family suffers multiple losses in the First World War, she finds the courage to leave the grief and toxicity behind and build a new life in England.  Now retired, she is living in a small coastal town with her best friend, Vera, an excellent conversationalist, and a small white dog!

When Emmeline joins a memoir-writing course at the library, her classmates don’t know what to make of her. Funny, loud, and with a riveting memoir, she charms the lot. As her past unfolds for her audience, friendships form, a bonus in a rather lonely life. She even shares with them her third-biggest secret: she is a compulsive spoon stealer. In her lifetime, she has liberated hundreds of spoons —from the local library, Cary Grant, Winston Churchill. In her final years, she believes that a spoonful—perhaps several spoonfuls—of kindness can set to rights the family so broken by loss and secrecy.  

“Emmeline is based on my grandfather’s sibling. My great aunt, in 1919, went all the way across the world as a young woman during the pandemic. I mean, how fantastic to think of this young woman going overseas at a time when young women didn’t go halfway around the world by themselves? And of course, she stayed. She had to stay until the war was over. She couldn’t get back. So I really only used that one little thing about going over to England during the war as a jumping off point.” — Lesley Crewe, CBC, 2022 

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