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Pearl

by Siân Hughes

Narrator Laura Brydon

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Length 6 hours 41 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“This is a beautiful and melancholy exploration of the ways grief, like the river that inhabits so much of this lovely novel, shapes the lives of those it touches. Siân Hughes has created something extraordinary in the paths she weaves through the life and landscape of a small English village and particularly by way of her narrator Marianne, whose mother vanished when Marianne was a little girl. Pearl is a gift to readers looking to understand their own losses and the complicated shadows those losses leave behind. ”
— Rafe • Third Place Books

Summary

Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.

As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a medieval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete.

Tormented by an unmarked gravestone in an abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, her childhood home begins to crumble as the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. But can art heal Marianne? And will her own future as a mother help her find peace?

Fiction Fiction - Literary