[In the following review, the critic identifies praiseworthy qualities in Evidence of Love.]

Three of the sections of Grau's new novel [Evidence of Love] are written in the first person by two men—Edward Milton Henley (old, rich and crudely self-indulgent), Stephen Henley (his heir, obsessed with obscurantism, a tight and dour religiosity), and again, Edward Milton Henley (now ancient, wanting and welcoming death). And one section is Lucy's, the wife-widow of Stephen. The style is remarkable in many ways, in the seemingly surface probing of each of the characters. Lightly, flittingly, Grau succeeds in really fleshing her people so well that we feel them, touch them, smell them. And yet at no time in her writing do we really forget that it is a woman who is writing, even though she is writing in first person for each of these people. The self-portraits, wide in scope, tight in style, emerge in their examination of their lives and loves. The novel lazes from the Philadelphia in the 1880’s to Europe at the turn of the century, from the steppes of Africa to American coal towns, from London to a modern Chicago condominium, and then to a retirement area in Florida in the 1970’s. Grau writes with grace, patterns her new novel with flair and the result is highly readable and memorable.