Richard Goodkin’s novel “Mourning Light” is a book 30 years in the making.
Or 84 years, if you consider its connections to Daphne du Maurier’s classic 1938 Gothic novel “Rebecca,” a book that haunts “Mourning Light” like the memory of a lost loved one.
Goodkin, a French professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has also published another novel in French, began working on the first draft of “Mourning Light” in 1993. It was two years after his partner had died in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, and the novel is also about a UW professor coming to grips with his grief.