Louise Penny’s latest novel grew from a forgotten Victorian botanist and a plant planted in other people’s gardens without their knowledge. The author says she found the story of Ellen Willmott while exploring a London gardening museum, where the eccentric amateur’s work caught her attention.
In Miss Wolcott’s Ghost, published October 20 by Minotaur, Penny draws on Willmott’s habit of secretly introducing a plant called Miss Willmott’s Ghost into the gardens of prominent neighbors. “A kind of guerrilla warfare,” she said. For Penny, the appeal wasn’t simply that history had overlooked Willmott. “It’s more feeling like a child in a candy shop.”
The book is Penny’s 21st. Her best-known creation, Quebec homicide detective Armand Gamache, has built his reputation by offering second chances to people others have cast aside. Penny’s interest in the past and in redemption runs through the series, though she says she isn’t trying to persuade readers to share her beliefs.
A decision with a personal cost
Penny spoke with Publishers Weekly from Montreal about politics, religion and the choice to skip U.S. stops on her tour for Black Wolf. Her decision came amid a tariff dispute and increasingly hostile cross-border rhetoric. She says it still stands, though she hasn’t decided what would need to change before she returned.
“This is more than willing to stand up for itself,” she said of Canada. The choice hasn’t helped book sales, she added, and she recognizes that some readers who might have attended an event or bought a book may disagree with her. “It would be childish to take a stand and not expect that.” She has a home in New York and strong ties to the United States, making the decision painful. Her U.S. publisher, she said, has supported her and hasn’t pressed her to tour.
Kindness as a hard choice
Gamache’s decency, Penny said, comes partly from having been hurt. She connects that idea to W.H. Auden’s elegy to W.B. Yeats, which includes the line, “mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Her husband, Michael, also shaped her thinking: he believed that choosing kindness takes more courage than cruelty.
That conviction gives the books’ themes of forgiveness and redemption their moral weight. “In my books, it’s harder not to pull the trigger than to pull the trigger,” Penny said. Gamache’s spirituality, she explained, sits alongside humanist themes. She isn’t anti-church, though she lives in Quebec, where people turned away from religion for good reason.
Penny recently appeared with the Archbishop of Sweden, who pointed out a biblical passage she had quoted in one of her books. Her first reaction was concern that she might have cited it incorrectly. The moment reflects how closely religious references and spiritual questions sit within her work, even as she leaves readers free to make their own judgments. She appeared with the archbishop recently.
Success put to work
After years of unexpected success, Penny says she still loves writing and can’t imagine stopping. One result of that success is the Three Pines Foundation, established in memory of Michael, a pediatric oncologist who died in 2016 after a long battle with dementia. The foundation supports dementia care, literacy and other causes.
Penny says the organization focuses on practical help: an older person who can’t afford an electricity bill, or a family facing a cancer diagnosis after its breadwinner becomes ill. “It doesn’t take much to make a difference: a couple thousand here, a hundred there.” Michael, she said, understood “what a great gift life is” and the responsibility to live with decency. For Penny, that principle runs from her charitable work to Gamache’s choices—and through the difficult decisions her own success now allows her to make.
Geoff Koch is a writer and poet in Portland, Ore.
