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The Hand That First Held Mine
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
Non-member price: $20.28
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Publisher's Summary
An unforgettable novel of love and motherhood from best-selling author Maggie O'Farrell.
Winner of the 2010 Costa Novel Award and a Sunday Times best seller, The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O'Farrell is a gorgeously written story of love and motherhood from the author of This Must Be the Place.
When the sophisticated Innes Kent turns up on her doorstep, Lexie Sinclair realises she cannot wait any longer for her life to begin and leaves for London. There, at the heart of the 1950s Soho art scene, she carves out a new life. In the present day, Elina and Ted are reeling from the difficult birth of their first child. Elina struggles to reconcile the demands of motherhood with her sense of herself as an artist and Ted is disturbed by memories of his own childhood that don't tally with his parents' version of events. As Ted begins to search for answers, an extraordinary portrait of two women is revealed, separated by 50 years, but connected in ways that neither could ever have expected.
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What listeners say about The Hand That First Held Mine
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Anonymous User
- 20-08-2018
Slow to develop
I didn't like the present tense style - he said she said she picks up .... etc. A bit tedious. Very slow to develop.
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- Julie
- 12-02-2018
I was so sad when it ended!
I could have listened to tales from the lives of the two protagonists until the cows came home. I particularly enjoyed Lexi and I would have equally liked Elina if not for the dodgy attempt at her accent on the audible recording. I felt like the book could have happily meandered along ad finitum for me!
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- Felicity
- 13-04-2017
Gripping and moving
Would you listen to The Hand That First Held Mine again? Why?
Yes, it's so intriguing and complicated I think I missed a few clues first time around.
What did you like best about this story?
Great characters, a mystery, interweaving of past and present, beautifully written
Which character – as performed by Karen Cass – was your favourite?
Lexie
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Yes, but I'm not giving it away here!
Any additional comments?
I just love this author and the narrator is brilliant at creating the characters.
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- happy loon
- 07-07-2015
amazing
such a great story so well read. first Maggie o Farrell for me but wont be the last.
beautiful x
6 people found this helpful
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- Gillian
- 18-03-2015
Best one yet
I'm really enjoying reading my way through the works of Maggie O'Farrell - and I'd say this was the best yet. Beautifully interwoven stories, fascinating, frustrating, likeable, annoying characters and the detective game of working out how they are connected. Her descriptions are delicate, rhythmic and evocative - of the time I was born and the time I live in today.
Hugo recommended.
6 people found this helpful
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- Alex Marsh
- 02-07-2020
Solid without being exceptional
A perfectly fine novel but not one that grabbed me. one issue was that I was much more interested in one narrative than another (I liked the 2000s narrative to the 1960s/70s one). I found the older narrative much less gripping and the character less rounded.
2 people found this helpful
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- LyndyLou
- 11-02-2020
Too long.
The first two thirds of this book proved a very mundane listening experience. It wasn’t till the last chapters that everything came together and the characters actually sparked my interest. Up to that time, I found the writing and the story quite tedious. I was glad when I finished and wouldn’t recommend it.
1 person found this helpful
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- Kirstine
- 29-06-2016
Separate stories take too long to come together
It took many hours of listening, to largely descriptive writing, to arouse my interest in the lives of two couples whose separate stories alternate and switch back and forth in time. Having to keep readjusting to which couple’s life was being described and at which time in their lives added to my lack of engagement. The narratives focus too long on the relationships within each couple unanchored by time and place. Many chapters went by before I realised that Lexie and Innis met in the 1950s and Ted and Elina in the present century. After hours of mundane listening things did pick up, but not until the last 30 minutes or so of the recording do the two quite separate stories come together. There are two moderately interesting books in this one novel but the sum is less than the parts. The writing is good, but the disjointed nature of the book is a distraction.
The reader is good and did inject life into the characters
2 people found this helpful
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- Julia
- 02-09-2020
Very enjoyable
An intriguing idea with believable characters. I shall now look for another of Maggie Farrel’s books.
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- Stella
- 28-06-2019
romantic, funny, thought-provoking
I had read this and I loved listening to it too. it's an intricate double story which comes together in a way that makes you angry, happy and possibly tearful- she delights in life and it's full of joie de vivre even at its worst moments. listen or read !
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- Anonymous User
- 13-06-2017
Disappointed after high expectations
The narrator's voice made it very tough going.. Some of the plot and details were not credible. I don't think the author had children when writing this book.
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- Homeland problem
- 05-06-2017
Five star all round
This is a book that I will think about for a very long time. I loved it
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- Jane
- 09-12-2016
Oh dear
I had enjoyed another book by Maggie O'Farrell but, I'm afraid, not this one. A nice idea, of the two stories, but they took far too long of tedious detail to get to the point of bringing them together. Not sure that there was one character in the book that I liked, possibly because they were sketched out as caricatures rather than real people. O'Farrell also seems to write a lot of 'lists' to make her point which became a very over-worked mechanism. None of this was helped by the narrator having to 'perform' lots of dialogue within the book.
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