Pearl cover art

Pearl

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Pearl

By: Siân Hughes
Narrated by: Laura Brydon
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About this listen

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023

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?

©2023 Siân Hughes (P)2023 W. F. Howes Ltd
Family Life Genre Fiction Psychological Women's Fiction Fiction Suspense
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Great story about motherhood in all its messy, insane, confusing glory & the realisation of the child about what really happened.

Great story of the complications of mother hood

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Brimming with nursery rhymes and folktales, this is a fairly quiet story of the grief felt by a daughter for the mother who simply went missing one day when she was eight years old. While I enjoyed it, I expected to connect with it more strongly than I actually did. That is, up until the end, which provided a moving and fairly satisfying resolution to the mystery.

Satisfying resolution

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.