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Pearl
Win a free kindle copy of this book!
1 day and 17:37:11
100 copies available
U.S. only
A haunting debut novel inspired by the medieval poem of the same name
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?
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?
220 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2023
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August 30, 2023
Longlisted for the Booker prize 2023
Book 4/13 (Dead Mother no. 1)
One dominating theme that stands out among the longlisted books is the grief after losing one’s mother. Pearl is the 1st I’ve read on the subject and probably the best. Marianne, losses her mother when she is 8. Burdened by mental health problems, she disappears one day, the last proof of her is found around the river banks. Besides the daughter, she lives behind a baby son and her grieving husband. Marianne struggles to adapt to losing her mother, to moving house, to growing up and to having a daughter. All her life is marked by the loss and she continues to relieve her past. She becomes obsessed with a poem called Pearl, which helps her overcome her trauma. The novel is more complex than what I wrote, the writing is lyrical.
The novel is my 2nd favourite so far from the longlist and I hope it will make the shortlist later this month
Book 4/13 (Dead Mother no. 1)
One dominating theme that stands out among the longlisted books is the grief after losing one’s mother. Pearl is the 1st I’ve read on the subject and probably the best. Marianne, losses her mother when she is 8. Burdened by mental health problems, she disappears one day, the last proof of her is found around the river banks. Besides the daughter, she lives behind a baby son and her grieving husband. Marianne struggles to adapt to losing her mother, to moving house, to growing up and to having a daughter. All her life is marked by the loss and she continues to relieve her past. She becomes obsessed with a poem called Pearl, which helps her overcome her trauma. The novel is more complex than what I wrote, the writing is lyrical.
The novel is my 2nd favourite so far from the longlist and I hope it will make the shortlist later this month
November 12, 2023
Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
While I'm starting to get a hunch that this is an overall tragically a-political longlist with a weird focus on grief, dead mothers and child protagonists, I also have to say that highlighting this gem by nominating it is well justified: In the novel, narrator Marianne tells her life story, from losing her mother at only 8 years old to becoming a mother herself. The book is a variation on the medieval poem "Pearl", in which the lyrical I grieves the loss of his precious white pearl, apparently symbolizing his daughter (or wife?), and dreams of a river, deeming the far side of the bank to be paradise: He sees a girl there wearing a dress full of white pearls and, believing her to be his pearl, aims to cross the river - then wakes up.
In Hughes' (a Welsh poet) debut novel, we have a grieving child whose mother left the family home after giving birth to her younger brother and disappeared, her footprints lastly being found at the river bank nearby. The story slowly reveals what pearl the mother might have been looking for, and what prompted her behavior. Hughes does an excellent job rendering the nature of grief not only in adjectives, but in strong imagery and whole plot points employed to illustrate Marianne's emotions as a child (extra credit for the great haunted house scenes, loved it). While to work with medieval poetry can easily aquire a pretentious vibe, the metaphors are affecting and effective, even the really over-used river to the afterlife gets a pass from me. Jesus, all the chapters start with folk rhymes, which I would 100% hate when done by a lesser talent than Hughes.
The strong sense of place is inspired by the author's own surroundings in Cheshire, and the stories of both the mother and Marianne as well as the experiences they share are rooted in the experiences of the author and her own mother - the result feels precise and authentic, but still refrains from the confessional feel that a lot of recent literature displays. While grown up Marianne studies art and remixes "Pearl" in her work, the author did her PhD in Creative Writing while trying to transpose the medieval poem (you can learn more about the writing process from Siân Hughes herself here, but watch out: major spoilers).
Good choice, Booker judges (I still feel like the composition of the list as a whole is bonkers).
While I'm starting to get a hunch that this is an overall tragically a-political longlist with a weird focus on grief, dead mothers and child protagonists, I also have to say that highlighting this gem by nominating it is well justified: In the novel, narrator Marianne tells her life story, from losing her mother at only 8 years old to becoming a mother herself. The book is a variation on the medieval poem "Pearl", in which the lyrical I grieves the loss of his precious white pearl, apparently symbolizing his daughter (or wife?), and dreams of a river, deeming the far side of the bank to be paradise: He sees a girl there wearing a dress full of white pearls and, believing her to be his pearl, aims to cross the river - then wakes up.
In Hughes' (a Welsh poet) debut novel, we have a grieving child whose mother left the family home after giving birth to her younger brother and disappeared, her footprints lastly being found at the river bank nearby. The story slowly reveals what pearl the mother might have been looking for, and what prompted her behavior. Hughes does an excellent job rendering the nature of grief not only in adjectives, but in strong imagery and whole plot points employed to illustrate Marianne's emotions as a child (extra credit for the great haunted house scenes, loved it). While to work with medieval poetry can easily aquire a pretentious vibe, the metaphors are affecting and effective, even the really over-used river to the afterlife gets a pass from me. Jesus, all the chapters start with folk rhymes, which I would 100% hate when done by a lesser talent than Hughes.
The strong sense of place is inspired by the author's own surroundings in Cheshire, and the stories of both the mother and Marianne as well as the experiences they share are rooted in the experiences of the author and her own mother - the result feels precise and authentic, but still refrains from the confessional feel that a lot of recent literature displays. While grown up Marianne studies art and remixes "Pearl" in her work, the author did her PhD in Creative Writing while trying to transpose the medieval poem (you can learn more about the writing process from Siân Hughes herself here, but watch out: major spoilers).
Good choice, Booker judges (I still feel like the composition of the list as a whole is bonkers).
September 4, 2023
*Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize*
“When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.”
When Marianne Brown was eight years old, her mother disappeared, leaving her and her brother, who was just a baby at the time, to be raised by their father Edward, a college professor. The search for her mother revealed one footprint on the banks of a river near their home and nothing else. Growing up. Her mother’s disappearance was not discussed much and eventually, the family moved from what was once their home to live closer to where her father worked. The loss of her mother at such a young age left an indelible imprint on Marianne’s life. We follow her through her childhood, troubled teenage years and her own journey as a mother. As she grows older, Marianne struggles to hold onto her mother through a kaleidoscope of fragmented memories, often confused and overwhelmed by conflicting versions of events she can recall. Her memories of the time they spent together, her stories, the books they read, including the medieval poem “Pearl” (from which the title of this novel is inspired, though the details of the poem are not shared in the narrative) she found in one her mother’s books have a profound impact on her life and her worldview.
“Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.”
Pearl by debut author Siân Hughes is a short but intense read – an exploration of grief and loss and how it evolves over the course of one’s life. The story did take a while to reel me in, but as the narrative progressed, I found myself deeply invested in Marianne’s journey. Revolving around themes of loss, grief, motherhood and self-discovery, the story is presented in the first-person narrative format from Marianne’s perspective. Marianne’s journey is a difficult one, and we bear witness to how, as she evolves as a person, her grief manifests into a quest to understand her mother and the events that led to her disappearance. She might not find all the answers, but in the course of her quest, she embarks on a cathartic journey of hope and personal healing. The author incorporates local ‘lore and customs into the narrative and each chapter begins with lines from poems /rhymes inspired by folklore. With its lyrical prose and vivid imagery, this is a beautifully written and profoundly moving story that will strike a chord in your heart.
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“When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.”
When Marianne Brown was eight years old, her mother disappeared, leaving her and her brother, who was just a baby at the time, to be raised by their father Edward, a college professor. The search for her mother revealed one footprint on the banks of a river near their home and nothing else. Growing up. Her mother’s disappearance was not discussed much and eventually, the family moved from what was once their home to live closer to where her father worked. The loss of her mother at such a young age left an indelible imprint on Marianne’s life. We follow her through her childhood, troubled teenage years and her own journey as a mother. As she grows older, Marianne struggles to hold onto her mother through a kaleidoscope of fragmented memories, often confused and overwhelmed by conflicting versions of events she can recall. Her memories of the time they spent together, her stories, the books they read, including the medieval poem “Pearl” (from which the title of this novel is inspired, though the details of the poem are not shared in the narrative) she found in one her mother’s books have a profound impact on her life and her worldview.
“Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.”
Pearl by debut author Siân Hughes is a short but intense read – an exploration of grief and loss and how it evolves over the course of one’s life. The story did take a while to reel me in, but as the narrative progressed, I found myself deeply invested in Marianne’s journey. Revolving around themes of loss, grief, motherhood and self-discovery, the story is presented in the first-person narrative format from Marianne’s perspective. Marianne’s journey is a difficult one, and we bear witness to how, as she evolves as a person, her grief manifests into a quest to understand her mother and the events that led to her disappearance. She might not find all the answers, but in the course of her quest, she embarks on a cathartic journey of hope and personal healing. The author incorporates local ‘lore and customs into the narrative and each chapter begins with lines from poems /rhymes inspired by folklore. With its lyrical prose and vivid imagery, this is a beautifully written and profoundly moving story that will strike a chord in your heart.
Connect with me! ✏ Instagram ✏ My Blog ✏ The StoryGraph
September 14, 2024
In a Nutshell: A literary fiction novel about a woman who finally learns how to deal with her unresolved grief. Slow and poignant but also rambling (in both its meanings.) Might be a good read for the right reader, but not my cup of tea. (Should have known better, considering it is a Booker-longlisted work.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Plot Preview:
I have a fondness for Irish writers. I have a dislike for Booker books (whether winner or longlisted.) I have a soft spot for literary fiction. I shun books that wallow in misery. I love character-oriented books. I avoid novels that are heavily prose-dominated. So this novel could have gone either way. Unfortunately for me (and the book), it went the way it shouldn’t have.
The plot begins with Marianne’s visit to her village for ‘The Wakes’, an annual trip she makes in the hope of seeing her mother again. She then starts reminiscing about her past, going back thirty years to when her mother disappeared and leading us through the interim period: her childhood hurt, her teen struggles, her adult uncertainty.
The book starts off strongly, with a poignant depiction of Marianne’s grief, her confusion about what might have happened, and her struggle to let go of the trauma and to live in the present. Until the narrative was focussed on Marianne’s childhood, I was invested in the story. But once the teen years start, the plot goes the typical way, trudging down the standard pitstops of teen rebellion such as drugs and alcohol and self-harm. I hoped for Marianne to come to her senses soon, but her adulthood seemed to be a series of one bad decision after another. Basically, it was like telling us that once you have trauma in your childhood, there’s no way of living a normal life personally or professionally.
The book depicts 1970s England and its atmosphere in a true-to-life manner. There are some interesting quotes at the start of every chapter, each taken from an Irish fictional work or folklore. The themes of grief and coming-of-age are seen throughout the book. But these come to us in an endlessly rambling manner. It was like listening to one long self-pitying story. I hoped that the ending would make things better, and it did, to a great extent. The parting chapter was beautiful and bittersweet, with some thought-provoking poetic lines.
Because of the first-person narration, we don’t get to know the other characters as intimately as we know Marianne. I’d especially have loved to know more about her father Edward and her daughter Susanna. It was interesting to see how Marianne always referred to her father as “Edward” but her mom was “my mother.”
The titular ‘Pearl’ has a strong presence through the book. ‘Pearl’, poet unknown, is a 14th-century poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works and has elements of allegory and dreams. It is present only in a single manuscript at the British Library in London. I read up a summary of the poem in order to better understand its role in this book, and this prep helped somewhat.
I found it interesting to learn that this novel has been forty years in the making. The author used to cycle past a broken-down house in the same village as ‘Pearl’ is set. She then invented characters for the house and began working on this novel. But perhaps the extended writing period created this meandering prose with minimal plot. (Then again, this was longlisted for the Booker, so whom am I kidding! It must hold at least some literary merit for prose lovers!)
I completed this debut work only because I had to complete it. This wasn’t written for us plot-aficionados. The introspective parts where Marianne wonders about the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens are the best. The parts about teen rebellion and going off track in adulthood are boring.
Basically, this is for those lit fic lovers who rejoice in Booker-type books, who value prose over plot, who believe that merit-worthy stories are necessarily dark and gritty stories that delve into human misery. The whole book is essentially segments of musings and introspection, so make sure you are in the right (prose-loving) mood if you intend to pick this up.
2 stars.
My thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing the DRC of “Pearl” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Connect with me through:
My Blog || The StoryGraph || Instagram || X/Twitter || Facebook ||
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Plot Preview:
When Marianne was eight, her mom went missing, leaving behind a distraught husband, a forlorn daughter, and a newborn son. As the years go by, Marianne struggles to make sense of her grief, and tries to understand what might have gone through her mother’s mind in her final moments. When she discovers a medieval poem named ‘Pearl’ and sees its theme being similar to that of her life, she tries to see her life and her pain through the poem’s lens of loss and healing.
The story comes to us in Marianne’s first-person perspective.
I have a fondness for Irish writers. I have a dislike for Booker books (whether winner or longlisted.) I have a soft spot for literary fiction. I shun books that wallow in misery. I love character-oriented books. I avoid novels that are heavily prose-dominated. So this novel could have gone either way. Unfortunately for me (and the book), it went the way it shouldn’t have.
The plot begins with Marianne’s visit to her village for ‘The Wakes’, an annual trip she makes in the hope of seeing her mother again. She then starts reminiscing about her past, going back thirty years to when her mother disappeared and leading us through the interim period: her childhood hurt, her teen struggles, her adult uncertainty.
The book starts off strongly, with a poignant depiction of Marianne’s grief, her confusion about what might have happened, and her struggle to let go of the trauma and to live in the present. Until the narrative was focussed on Marianne’s childhood, I was invested in the story. But once the teen years start, the plot goes the typical way, trudging down the standard pitstops of teen rebellion such as drugs and alcohol and self-harm. I hoped for Marianne to come to her senses soon, but her adulthood seemed to be a series of one bad decision after another. Basically, it was like telling us that once you have trauma in your childhood, there’s no way of living a normal life personally or professionally.
The book depicts 1970s England and its atmosphere in a true-to-life manner. There are some interesting quotes at the start of every chapter, each taken from an Irish fictional work or folklore. The themes of grief and coming-of-age are seen throughout the book. But these come to us in an endlessly rambling manner. It was like listening to one long self-pitying story. I hoped that the ending would make things better, and it did, to a great extent. The parting chapter was beautiful and bittersweet, with some thought-provoking poetic lines.
Because of the first-person narration, we don’t get to know the other characters as intimately as we know Marianne. I’d especially have loved to know more about her father Edward and her daughter Susanna. It was interesting to see how Marianne always referred to her father as “Edward” but her mom was “my mother.”
The titular ‘Pearl’ has a strong presence through the book. ‘Pearl’, poet unknown, is a 14th-century poem that is considered one of the most important surviving Middle English works and has elements of allegory and dreams. It is present only in a single manuscript at the British Library in London. I read up a summary of the poem in order to better understand its role in this book, and this prep helped somewhat.
I found it interesting to learn that this novel has been forty years in the making. The author used to cycle past a broken-down house in the same village as ‘Pearl’ is set. She then invented characters for the house and began working on this novel. But perhaps the extended writing period created this meandering prose with minimal plot. (Then again, this was longlisted for the Booker, so whom am I kidding! It must hold at least some literary merit for prose lovers!)
I completed this debut work only because I had to complete it. This wasn’t written for us plot-aficionados. The introspective parts where Marianne wonders about the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens are the best. The parts about teen rebellion and going off track in adulthood are boring.
Basically, this is for those lit fic lovers who rejoice in Booker-type books, who value prose over plot, who believe that merit-worthy stories are necessarily dark and gritty stories that delve into human misery. The whole book is essentially segments of musings and introspection, so make sure you are in the right (prose-loving) mood if you intend to pick this up.
2 stars.
My thanks to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing the DRC of “Pearl” via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Connect with me through:
My Blog || The StoryGraph || Instagram || X/Twitter || Facebook ||
August 26, 2023
I only finished it because I plan to read the entire Booker longlist this year. It's the first book that, even if I play the devil's advocate, I can't understand why it was nominated. Even when the author experiments, she does so in a manufactured, repetitive way, like the novel is written for school, showing us what she does to get the points. I'm going to remove my rating if I don't read the entire longlist, because this would have been an easy DNF for me.
August 28, 2023
Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
One of the bigger surprises on this year's list, this debut novel is impressive and deserves its place. It is loosely based on the mediaeval poem of the same name (believed to be the work of the author of the more famous Gawain and the Green Knight) and also by the village in South West Cheshire where the author lived as a child (and has now returned to).
At its heart is a family story - the narrator's mother disappeared when she was a small child and her younger brother was a baby, and the narrator becomes obsessed with her legacy and the local folklore she loved - each chapter is preceded by a traditional rhyme, many of them riddles, and folklore elements pervade the story, as does the ramschackle house the family has inherited on the edge of the village, which the father struggles to maintain and eventually has to abandon. The narrator also talks at length about her own troubled adolescence and how her mother's legacy affects her relationship with her own daughter.
One of the bigger surprises on this year's list, this debut novel is impressive and deserves its place. It is loosely based on the mediaeval poem of the same name (believed to be the work of the author of the more famous Gawain and the Green Knight) and also by the village in South West Cheshire where the author lived as a child (and has now returned to).
At its heart is a family story - the narrator's mother disappeared when she was a small child and her younger brother was a baby, and the narrator becomes obsessed with her legacy and the local folklore she loved - each chapter is preceded by a traditional rhyme, many of them riddles, and folklore elements pervade the story, as does the ramschackle house the family has inherited on the edge of the village, which the father struggles to maintain and eventually has to abandon. The narrator also talks at length about her own troubled adolescence and how her mother's legacy affects her relationship with her own daughter.
September 2, 2023
3.5, rounded down.
#4 of the 2023 Booker longlist for me.
The surprise indie-published book almost no one had heard of prior to its nomination was a pleasant enough read and kept me suitably engaged; but I find it hard to imagine this as one of the best books of the year. Partially, this is due to the fact that the book centers around issues of parenting - both the joys and drudgery of such; what happens to one's psyche when one is abandoned by one's mother; and the travails of post-partum psychosis - and these are not subjects I find intrinsically interesting or can really relate to, being childless and male.
But also, I found Hughe's prose style to be just serviceable rather than transporting - having just waded through the murky serpentine sentences of Study for Obedience, however, I was happy with prose I could understand on a basic level without too much effort.
I am not sure I QUITE got all the allusions to the medieval poem that shares its title with this tome; or even if that was supposed to be a major part of it. I originally intended to reread that prior to this, but the Wikipedia synopsis seemingly sufficed to tell me what I needed to know.
Oddly, my main preoccupation while reading it centered around trying to decide how much of this is autobiographical, since it seemed to be the musings of the author about her own life. In interviews, Hughes has talked about how long it took to write, and starting over myriad times before finishing, and Marianne, our narrator here, says much the same thing. But the following interview seems to indicate that much of this is indeed fiction: https://lucywritersplatform.com/2023/....
I'm happy for the author that after so much toil, she's getting some deserved attention - but would be surprised to see this make the short list.
#4 of the 2023 Booker longlist for me.
The surprise indie-published book almost no one had heard of prior to its nomination was a pleasant enough read and kept me suitably engaged; but I find it hard to imagine this as one of the best books of the year. Partially, this is due to the fact that the book centers around issues of parenting - both the joys and drudgery of such; what happens to one's psyche when one is abandoned by one's mother; and the travails of post-partum psychosis - and these are not subjects I find intrinsically interesting or can really relate to, being childless and male.
But also, I found Hughe's prose style to be just serviceable rather than transporting - having just waded through the murky serpentine sentences of Study for Obedience, however, I was happy with prose I could understand on a basic level without too much effort.
I am not sure I QUITE got all the allusions to the medieval poem that shares its title with this tome; or even if that was supposed to be a major part of it. I originally intended to reread that prior to this, but the Wikipedia synopsis seemingly sufficed to tell me what I needed to know.
Oddly, my main preoccupation while reading it centered around trying to decide how much of this is autobiographical, since it seemed to be the musings of the author about her own life. In interviews, Hughes has talked about how long it took to write, and starting over myriad times before finishing, and Marianne, our narrator here, says much the same thing. But the following interview seems to indicate that much of this is indeed fiction: https://lucywritersplatform.com/2023/....
I'm happy for the author that after so much toil, she's getting some deserved attention - but would be surprised to see this make the short list.
August 8, 2023
The Booker Prize 2023#1
I never again tried out the line about matter neither being created nor destroyed. My father had stopped saying it. So I worked out it had been a lie. Like so many certainties of the world before she left, it turned out to be a trick. Matter most definitely could be destroyed. It was entirely possible to lose something. Permanently. Remembering where you last saw it was no help at all. And even the things you held on to, kept in your sight, might change unrecognisably into something else.
Não sei se “Pearl” tem ou não potencial para vencer o Booker Prize 2023, mas conquistou-me da mesma forma que a Claire Keegan de “Foster/Acolher” e “The Forester's Daughter”, ainda que esta escritora conseguisse decerto contar esta história com a mesma contenção mas com metade das páginas, redução de que este livro beneficiaria.
Não foi preciso muito para a irlandesa Siân Hughes me envolver na história desta família cuja mãe sai um dia de casa, sem aviso, e desaparece, deixando o marido, um bebé de poucos meses e Marianne, de 8 anos, a narradora que diz, já adulta:
I still want to turn to her now. I’d like to tell her, there’s another name for it, there’s no need to live your whole life feeling that frightened. You can take pills for it, and make a wellness recovery plan, and meet with your key worker and tell your consultant if you are still seeing angels on the stairs.
Percebe-se, então, que é uma história de perda, de luto e, acima de tudo, de saúde mental.
Siân é perfeita a transmitir sentimentos sem pieguice. O choque que se somatiza…
Life after she left divided into things you could fix, and things you could not fix. My hair, for instance, was fixable. At first I didn’t understand why it was rough, and brownish, and stuck to my face. (…)Some things could not be fixed. Shock-induced type 2 diabetes. Chronic eczema.
…a saudade que quase ganha corporeidade na casa da família…
The air in the kitchen: the way the air in the kitchen set like jelly, and you had to be brave to walk into it, leave the radio on very loud, or open the door to the living room and leave children’s programmes running on a loop to break up the jelly into moveable chunks you could walk through.
…a culpa inexplicável mas inevitável.
Why didn’t I notice she had gone? The very minute, the second she was out of the door? It troubled me for years. What if I had seen her, and followed her? What if I had asked her to come back inside and see my cutting-out? (…)What if I had caught up with her as she walked down the footpath to the river?
Marianne, que nunca sequer frequentara a escola, acaba por se tornar uma rebelde com dificuldades de aprendizagem, mas Siân Hughes transmite-nos todo os comportamentos autodestrutivos característicos de uma jovem em profundo sofrimento de uma forma muito discreta, sem a exploração gratuita que a literatura da treta tanto aprecia.
I thought my child would heal my broken heart. I didn’t stop to ask if this was asking too much of her. I didn’t stop to think about what was passed on in my milk, the hurt, the loss, the anxiety.
Mas com a própria maternidade e a instabilidade emocional que dela advém, chega, por outro lado, o entendimento e o perdão.
What if no one is to blame? I prefer the word accident. Or the official one. Misadventure. Death by misadventure. Because I like the word adventure. That describes her well. My mother’s life was an adventure. But it went wrong.
Não sou a melhor pessoa para avaliar obras capazes de receber o prémio Booker, pois na verdade não vejo interesse em casos como “Os Testamentos”, “Mulher Rapariga Outra” e “Shuggie Bain”, enquanto “A Promessa” prometeu mais do que deu, sendo os meus preferidos de sempre “Milkman” de Anna Burns (olha, outra irlandesa) e “O Mar” de John Banville (olha, outro irlandês), mas “Pearl” foi um excelente arranque.
My first experiences of school confirmed my suspicion that life was better at home, and if anyone asks me now, why were you home-schooled, I have taught myself to say, because my mother was really good at it. And, as it turned out, I didn’t have much time with her, so I am glad, now, that we spent all those days together. It took me until I was well into my thirties, and a mother myself, to learn to think this way, to be brave enough to stand up for her, to stand up for my right to a positive memory of my mother. When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.
I never again tried out the line about matter neither being created nor destroyed. My father had stopped saying it. So I worked out it had been a lie. Like so many certainties of the world before she left, it turned out to be a trick. Matter most definitely could be destroyed. It was entirely possible to lose something. Permanently. Remembering where you last saw it was no help at all. And even the things you held on to, kept in your sight, might change unrecognisably into something else.
Não sei se “Pearl” tem ou não potencial para vencer o Booker Prize 2023, mas conquistou-me da mesma forma que a Claire Keegan de “Foster/Acolher” e “The Forester's Daughter”, ainda que esta escritora conseguisse decerto contar esta história com a mesma contenção mas com metade das páginas, redução de que este livro beneficiaria.
Não foi preciso muito para a irlandesa Siân Hughes me envolver na história desta família cuja mãe sai um dia de casa, sem aviso, e desaparece, deixando o marido, um bebé de poucos meses e Marianne, de 8 anos, a narradora que diz, já adulta:
I still want to turn to her now. I’d like to tell her, there’s another name for it, there’s no need to live your whole life feeling that frightened. You can take pills for it, and make a wellness recovery plan, and meet with your key worker and tell your consultant if you are still seeing angels on the stairs.
Percebe-se, então, que é uma história de perda, de luto e, acima de tudo, de saúde mental.
Siân é perfeita a transmitir sentimentos sem pieguice. O choque que se somatiza…
Life after she left divided into things you could fix, and things you could not fix. My hair, for instance, was fixable. At first I didn’t understand why it was rough, and brownish, and stuck to my face. (…)Some things could not be fixed. Shock-induced type 2 diabetes. Chronic eczema.
…a saudade que quase ganha corporeidade na casa da família…
The air in the kitchen: the way the air in the kitchen set like jelly, and you had to be brave to walk into it, leave the radio on very loud, or open the door to the living room and leave children’s programmes running on a loop to break up the jelly into moveable chunks you could walk through.
…a culpa inexplicável mas inevitável.
Why didn’t I notice she had gone? The very minute, the second she was out of the door? It troubled me for years. What if I had seen her, and followed her? What if I had asked her to come back inside and see my cutting-out? (…)What if I had caught up with her as she walked down the footpath to the river?
Marianne, que nunca sequer frequentara a escola, acaba por se tornar uma rebelde com dificuldades de aprendizagem, mas Siân Hughes transmite-nos todo os comportamentos autodestrutivos característicos de uma jovem em profundo sofrimento de uma forma muito discreta, sem a exploração gratuita que a literatura da treta tanto aprecia.
I thought my child would heal my broken heart. I didn’t stop to ask if this was asking too much of her. I didn’t stop to think about what was passed on in my milk, the hurt, the loss, the anxiety.
Mas com a própria maternidade e a instabilidade emocional que dela advém, chega, por outro lado, o entendimento e o perdão.
What if no one is to blame? I prefer the word accident. Or the official one. Misadventure. Death by misadventure. Because I like the word adventure. That describes her well. My mother’s life was an adventure. But it went wrong.
Não sou a melhor pessoa para avaliar obras capazes de receber o prémio Booker, pois na verdade não vejo interesse em casos como “Os Testamentos”, “Mulher Rapariga Outra” e “Shuggie Bain”, enquanto “A Promessa” prometeu mais do que deu, sendo os meus preferidos de sempre “Milkman” de Anna Burns (olha, outra irlandesa) e “O Mar” de John Banville (olha, outro irlandês), mas “Pearl” foi um excelente arranque.
My first experiences of school confirmed my suspicion that life was better at home, and if anyone asks me now, why were you home-schooled, I have taught myself to say, because my mother was really good at it. And, as it turned out, I didn’t have much time with her, so I am glad, now, that we spent all those days together. It took me until I was well into my thirties, and a mother myself, to learn to think this way, to be brave enough to stand up for her, to stand up for my right to a positive memory of my mother. When someone takes their life, they don’t only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold on to the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those five minutes turn out to be their last.
September 13, 2023
[Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize]
When Marianne is eight years old, her mother disappears. Over the next few decades in various ways, Marianne tries to cope with this loss, seeking solace in a medieval poem, wayward friendships, one night stands, and even the birth of her own daughter. But how does remembering the ones we loved, excavating the memories for potential answers of what happened, keep us from seeing what's right in front of us? And what happens when the answers you are looking for don't necessarily match up with the memories you've held so close for so long?
This was a beautiful and moving meditation on grief and loss written in a poetic, but still very grounded style. Laura Brydon narrated the audiobook I listened to which was fantastic. She performed that story, embodying Marianne's feelings so well. I swear near the end it sounded like *she* was getting choked up, and subsequently so was I.
There was just enough flower language to impress me but not to detract from the heart of the story, and how much heart there is in this book. I find when poets turn to long-form fiction, it can be hit or miss. This was a hit, for sure. Sian Hughes' prose was phenomenal, playful, inventive, and invigorating. But the story didn't suffer for that. I loved how it came full circle. I think the use of first person narration here was extremely powerful and effective.
I can't say enough good things about this one! I was tempted to start over right after finishing it, if that says anything about how I enjoyed it. Definitely one I can see myself reading again in the future.
When Marianne is eight years old, her mother disappears. Over the next few decades in various ways, Marianne tries to cope with this loss, seeking solace in a medieval poem, wayward friendships, one night stands, and even the birth of her own daughter. But how does remembering the ones we loved, excavating the memories for potential answers of what happened, keep us from seeing what's right in front of us? And what happens when the answers you are looking for don't necessarily match up with the memories you've held so close for so long?
This was a beautiful and moving meditation on grief and loss written in a poetic, but still very grounded style. Laura Brydon narrated the audiobook I listened to which was fantastic. She performed that story, embodying Marianne's feelings so well. I swear near the end it sounded like *she* was getting choked up, and subsequently so was I.
There was just enough flower language to impress me but not to detract from the heart of the story, and how much heart there is in this book. I find when poets turn to long-form fiction, it can be hit or miss. This was a hit, for sure. Sian Hughes' prose was phenomenal, playful, inventive, and invigorating. But the story didn't suffer for that. I loved how it came full circle. I think the use of first person narration here was extremely powerful and effective.
I can't say enough good things about this one! I was tempted to start over right after finishing it, if that says anything about how I enjoyed it. Definitely one I can see myself reading again in the future.
September 9, 2023
Pearl is quite an emotional journey if you are susceptible to lost mother stories. Oddly perhaps, I was reminded of last year's divisive Treacle Walker if only for the Old English verses and rhymes and the feeling that "Kit the Ancient Brit" would not be out of place in this one.
Sure there might be some pacing issues towards the end, a sense of a debut novelist unsure how to wrap things up but there is something charismatic about this book. It pulled me under and had me fretting for Marianne's well-being.
I wouldn't be disappointed to see it on a Booker shortlist.
Sure there might be some pacing issues towards the end, a sense of a debut novelist unsure how to wrap things up but there is something charismatic about this book. It pulled me under and had me fretting for Marianne's well-being.
I wouldn't be disappointed to see it on a Booker shortlist.
August 3, 2023
This book was perfect for me. The writing, the sadness, the beauty, the heaviness of heart. Excellent choice for the Booker.
So instead I talked about the creaks in the stairwell and the cries of the vixen in the garden that could pierce the soul.
When someone takes their life, they don't only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold onto the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those 5 minutes turn out to be their last.
So instead I talked about the creaks in the stairwell and the cries of the vixen in the garden that could pierce the soul.
When someone takes their life, they don't only steal the future out from under our feet, they also desecrate their past. It makes it hard to hold onto the good things about them. And no one deserves to be judged on the worst five minutes of their life, even if those 5 minutes turn out to be their last.
September 24, 2023
They never found a note. They didn't need to. Everything, she left us was a note.
The songs she left in my head, the fairy tales, skipping rhymes, conversations with the dead. The pot of tea in the middle of the table, safely away from her children. The basket of bits of wool she left for me to play with while she went for a nap with the baby. The bread proving in the bottom drawer of the range. The smell of fresh mint through the open window. The washing hanging outside to dry. The bookmark left in Alice in Wonderland under my pillow. The pile of colourful pencil shavings in the kitchen bin. The half-knitted striped jumper for when Joe went up a size. The seed catalogues tucked into the corner of the kitchen window.
Siân Hughes's Pearl is published by Indigo Press:
The Indigo Press is an independent publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, based in London. Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future.
This was deservedly Booker longlist and disappointingly omitted from the shortlist, so there are plenty of reviews on here so my review will be brief.
I look forward to the author's next novel, of which, as a work in progress she says "I seem to have ended up writing about two sisters who are brought up by a man who trains dogs and cockerels to fight for money. It is partly inspired by another poem in the Pearl manuscript, called Cleanness, or Purity."
Pearl itself is a beautiful and sensitively told story of maternal love but also post-partum depression / psychosis, drawing on 14th century poetry. This manages what much literature doesn't - to be both cleverly constructed but also deeply heartfelt (it feels so real I had to check if this was auto-fiction), which is testament to the passion and craft that went in to it. Truly Finest Fiction.
The songs she left in my head, the fairy tales, skipping rhymes, conversations with the dead. The pot of tea in the middle of the table, safely away from her children. The basket of bits of wool she left for me to play with while she went for a nap with the baby. The bread proving in the bottom drawer of the range. The smell of fresh mint through the open window. The washing hanging outside to dry. The bookmark left in Alice in Wonderland under my pillow. The pile of colourful pencil shavings in the kitchen bin. The half-knitted striped jumper for when Joe went up a size. The seed catalogues tucked into the corner of the kitchen window.
Siân Hughes's Pearl is published by Indigo Press:
The Indigo Press is an independent publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, based in London. Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future.
This was deservedly Booker longlist and disappointingly omitted from the shortlist, so there are plenty of reviews on here so my review will be brief.
I look forward to the author's next novel, of which, as a work in progress she says "I seem to have ended up writing about two sisters who are brought up by a man who trains dogs and cockerels to fight for money. It is partly inspired by another poem in the Pearl manuscript, called Cleanness, or Purity."
Pearl itself is a beautiful and sensitively told story of maternal love but also post-partum depression / psychosis, drawing on 14th century poetry. This manages what much literature doesn't - to be both cleverly constructed but also deeply heartfelt (it feels so real I had to check if this was auto-fiction), which is testament to the passion and craft that went in to it. Truly Finest Fiction.
August 20, 2023
August 2nd 2023:
I may have been living under a rock, but I had never heard of this book before its Booker Nomination. I'm intrigued...
August 20th 2023 Update: I’m so happy they put this on the list, so I got to experience it. What an absolutely beautiful, deeply melancholic and resonant story. With its strong sense of place (both geographically with its portrayal of rural England, as well as its place in the literary canon) and poignant character observations, this truly feels like it belongs on a literary-prize-list.
Well done Siân Hughes!
I may have been living under a rock, but I had never heard of this book before its Booker Nomination. I'm intrigued...
August 20th 2023 Update: I’m so happy they put this on the list, so I got to experience it. What an absolutely beautiful, deeply melancholic and resonant story. With its strong sense of place (both geographically with its portrayal of rural England, as well as its place in the literary canon) and poignant character observations, this truly feels like it belongs on a literary-prize-list.
Well done Siân Hughes!
September 19, 2023
Gorgeous.
August 29, 2023
Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize.
This novel opens with the protagonist, Marianne, and her daughter returning to her home village for a local carnival called the Wakes. The start of the festival is marked by a communal funeral where everybody dresses their family’s grave with rushes. Their grave is tiny, more of a marker stone than a tombstone. There is only one address on the stone, the same date for the birth and death. This stone is so important.
When Marianne was eight years old, her mother disappeared. Her footprints left leading up to the bank in the river. Marianne secretly hopes that one of these years, at the festival, her mother will miraculously return.
What makes the loss of her mother even more tragic, harder at times to bear, is that Marianne and her mother were very close. Marianne was homeschooled and most days mother and daughter were inseparable.
Hughs takes us through Marianne’s mind. The thoughts, the sadness, the lack of ability for an eight-year-old mind to find a reason for her mother’s disappearance. Was she coming back? Did Marianne do something wrong?
Although the novel will cover Marianne’s life, she is now a mother herself, the very heart of the book is Marianne’s almost primal need to know what happened to her mother. It has defined her life. She replays memories in her head like somebody flicking through pictures in a viewfinder.
This is another of these novels where the reader is left as clueless as the reader as to why the mother left, or if she is even alive. It is also another novel that questions the reliability of memory. Do things really happen how we remember them?
A major theme explored is post-partum depression and psychosis and as Hughs herself went through the same condition, there is a deep sense of authenticity. Without spoiling the ending, it is easy to see that Marianne’s mother was suffering, and the reader finds out more as the book nears the ending.
I found this to be a well-balanced novel, and again, without giving away spoilers, believe that Hughs does a wonderful job with the ending.
This novel opens with the protagonist, Marianne, and her daughter returning to her home village for a local carnival called the Wakes. The start of the festival is marked by a communal funeral where everybody dresses their family’s grave with rushes. Their grave is tiny, more of a marker stone than a tombstone. There is only one address on the stone, the same date for the birth and death. This stone is so important.
When Marianne was eight years old, her mother disappeared. Her footprints left leading up to the bank in the river. Marianne secretly hopes that one of these years, at the festival, her mother will miraculously return.
What makes the loss of her mother even more tragic, harder at times to bear, is that Marianne and her mother were very close. Marianne was homeschooled and most days mother and daughter were inseparable.
Hughs takes us through Marianne’s mind. The thoughts, the sadness, the lack of ability for an eight-year-old mind to find a reason for her mother’s disappearance. Was she coming back? Did Marianne do something wrong?
Although the novel will cover Marianne’s life, she is now a mother herself, the very heart of the book is Marianne’s almost primal need to know what happened to her mother. It has defined her life. She replays memories in her head like somebody flicking through pictures in a viewfinder.
This is another of these novels where the reader is left as clueless as the reader as to why the mother left, or if she is even alive. It is also another novel that questions the reliability of memory. Do things really happen how we remember them?
A major theme explored is post-partum depression and psychosis and as Hughs herself went through the same condition, there is a deep sense of authenticity. Without spoiling the ending, it is easy to see that Marianne’s mother was suffering, and the reader finds out more as the book nears the ending.
I found this to be a well-balanced novel, and again, without giving away spoilers, believe that Hughs does a wonderful job with the ending.
August 17, 2023
Let’s set aside the fact that the title and the medieval poem it was taken from, are barely mentioned in the book (the synopsis makes it seem like a huge factor, it isn’t). But, like I said, set that aside, this debut novel did it for me, even though at the beginning, I wasn’t 100% sure.
A wild and sprawling (even though it’s a shortie) look at grief and mourning; showing us how losing a loved one (mother) at such a young age can send you on a messy path for your entire life. Grief doesn’t go away and follows throughout the different stages of your life. What I especially loved about how Hughes chose to tell this story, is how she always kept the story wildly entertaining and slightly bonkers with several colourful characters taking command of these pages, but never losing sight of the raw emotions of her main character. Those confusing feelings were always at the forefront.
Loved this.
A wild and sprawling (even though it’s a shortie) look at grief and mourning; showing us how losing a loved one (mother) at such a young age can send you on a messy path for your entire life. Grief doesn’t go away and follows throughout the different stages of your life. What I especially loved about how Hughes chose to tell this story, is how she always kept the story wildly entertaining and slightly bonkers with several colourful characters taking command of these pages, but never losing sight of the raw emotions of her main character. Those confusing feelings were always at the forefront.
Loved this.
September 2, 2023
Some unfortunate souls experience life-altering events when they are young. Losing one's mother might rank up there as one of the most indelible one can imagine. And when the loss is surrounded with a mystery never fully answered, well, that's the stuff of endless churning, endless seeking, endless questioning. What this story lacks in plot-based forward momentum it makes up for in a rhythmic circling within the eddy of memory and possibility; in the excruciating mental autopsy taking place in the daughter trying to glue together the shards of experience and memories into recognizable form; in the evolution of understanding possible with time and life events bringing new light into dark places.
Our now-adult protagonist shares recollections as she looks backwards, giving the reader a rich tapestry of her motherless life and the outcome of this sudden loss to her self-view and subsequent choices. I was immersed in that world view with her, through prose rich with meaning and eloquence.
"Everything about my life until the day she disappeared was evidence of happiness.....But in the weeks after she left, we turned all of it into its opposite. We turned it inside out to look for the secret unhappiness hidden inside it. By the time we stopped to think, 'Hey, be careful with that, if you take it apart you won't be able to put it back together!' it was too late."
"She lost track of the days and she lost track of her sadness. So when it came back at her, it caught her off-guard. It reared up viciously and tore into her with its accusation: how could you forget me? How dare you be happy? And she was too tired and too unguarded and joyful to have any defense against it. It tore her from her happiness and sent her to the river and held her face under the water."
This book looks at motherhood, loss, memory, parental influences on who we become and what we remember, and it does so as a deep and slow dive under the surface. For me it was a gentle book, but one filled with emotion and beauty.
Our now-adult protagonist shares recollections as she looks backwards, giving the reader a rich tapestry of her motherless life and the outcome of this sudden loss to her self-view and subsequent choices. I was immersed in that world view with her, through prose rich with meaning and eloquence.
"Everything about my life until the day she disappeared was evidence of happiness.....But in the weeks after she left, we turned all of it into its opposite. We turned it inside out to look for the secret unhappiness hidden inside it. By the time we stopped to think, 'Hey, be careful with that, if you take it apart you won't be able to put it back together!' it was too late."
"She lost track of the days and she lost track of her sadness. So when it came back at her, it caught her off-guard. It reared up viciously and tore into her with its accusation: how could you forget me? How dare you be happy? And she was too tired and too unguarded and joyful to have any defense against it. It tore her from her happiness and sent her to the river and held her face under the water."
This book looks at motherhood, loss, memory, parental influences on who we become and what we remember, and it does so as a deep and slow dive under the surface. For me it was a gentle book, but one filled with emotion and beauty.
August 28, 2023
Protagonist (and narrator) Marianne is eight years old when her mother disappears, leaving her father, Edward, to rear her and her baby brother. The story is told from an older Marianne’s perspective after becoming a mother herself. She tells of her mother’s disappearance and how it impacts their family. She has always been fixated on figuring out exactly what led her mother to walk down the garden path to the stream and disappear.
It is poetically written, and each chapter starts with a poem, song, or nursery rhyme. It has a basis in the medieval poem called Pearl (which I had to look up), but the reader does not need to be intimately familiar with it in order to appreciate this story. The tone is melancholy. It reflects the healing properties of art. It is a story of grief, abandonment, motherhood, and the lingering effects of trauma. I became more invested in this book as it progressed. It flows nicely, and the ending is beautifully rendered.
It is poetically written, and each chapter starts with a poem, song, or nursery rhyme. It has a basis in the medieval poem called Pearl (which I had to look up), but the reader does not need to be intimately familiar with it in order to appreciate this story. The tone is melancholy. It reflects the healing properties of art. It is a story of grief, abandonment, motherhood, and the lingering effects of trauma. I became more invested in this book as it progressed. It flows nicely, and the ending is beautifully rendered.
September 15, 2023
Does grief make us look for something bad that is the root cause? Does grief demand that we are never happy again? Do we have to die alongside the ones who have really died?
Sometimes, in the time of mourning, we fall into the wormhole that the above questions lead us to. Sian Hughes Marianne does fall into such a wormhole. It's sad to see and to follow. One thing I'm very sure of is that our dead loved ones surely do not want us unhappy. They want us to be happy and continue. That is what love is, after all. And the dead ones who do not love us do not really count, do they.
Booker 2023 Longlist
Sometimes, in the time of mourning, we fall into the wormhole that the above questions lead us to. Sian Hughes Marianne does fall into such a wormhole. It's sad to see and to follow. One thing I'm very sure of is that our dead loved ones surely do not want us unhappy. They want us to be happy and continue. That is what love is, after all. And the dead ones who do not love us do not really count, do they.
Booker 2023 Longlist
August 14, 2023
3.5 stars
Pearl was a solid case of a book that got better as it went—beautiful in the start but breathtaking when done unfurling. Slow to bloom, but what a sight. I had to pause for a few days after finishing it, and think about where it had led me.
The premise of this novel is deceptively simple: Marianne is eight years old when her mother disappears without a trace—no note in her wake, nothing but a muddy footprint by the riverbank that is just as soon trampled upon and forgotten. Growing up without her, full yet of the songs, stories, and idiosyncracies her mother shared with her, Marianne struggles to adjust: she is tormented by the transience of her memories, and holds on to what she can—the medieval poem she annotated by hand, with its promise of consolation; the unmarked gravestone they visited during the Wakes; the ramshackle house that used to be their home together—in hopes that she can piece together the gaps in her knowledge of what happened to her. The past—whether material, or a memory, or both—is bound to break down. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but it does change form. It gives. A motherless child may still be a motherless child when she becomes a mother, but at no two points is she the same. And at no point can she be un-mothered.
Pearl is, in one sense, a coming-of-age novel, one that is deeply marked by grief and one that endeavours to explore with ceaseless honesty what loss—and love—can do to a child and the adult they go on to become—imagine a time-lapse video of a heartbreak. But it also brings us to head with the fact that grief can often make us focus on the wrong things, ask the wrong questions, and colour a life the hue of the tragedy that came after it. Grief often makes us look at the person we lose through the lens of our own experiences; for Marianne this is her own post-partum psychosis seeming to reveal a reflection of her mother. As much as her story is about growing into and around one’s grief—being overwhelmed, transformed, and pursued by it—it is also about healing, and how it comes to pass in ways we may expect as well as those that we don’t.
Though the author here steeps us in the emotional landscape of a single character, the narrative—with the way in which it dissembles folk fairytales and uses poetry to epigraph each chapter—pushes us to consider the situation equally from the outside in, from the distinct worlds we come to the story from. It is a musical and melancholic tale, and one that I would encourage reading on those grounds alone. Let is surprise you and make you weep.
Pearl was a solid case of a book that got better as it went—beautiful in the start but breathtaking when done unfurling. Slow to bloom, but what a sight. I had to pause for a few days after finishing it, and think about where it had led me.
The premise of this novel is deceptively simple: Marianne is eight years old when her mother disappears without a trace—no note in her wake, nothing but a muddy footprint by the riverbank that is just as soon trampled upon and forgotten. Growing up without her, full yet of the songs, stories, and idiosyncracies her mother shared with her, Marianne struggles to adjust: she is tormented by the transience of her memories, and holds on to what she can—the medieval poem she annotated by hand, with its promise of consolation; the unmarked gravestone they visited during the Wakes; the ramshackle house that used to be their home together—in hopes that she can piece together the gaps in her knowledge of what happened to her. The past—whether material, or a memory, or both—is bound to break down. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, but it does change form. It gives. A motherless child may still be a motherless child when she becomes a mother, but at no two points is she the same. And at no point can she be un-mothered.
Pearl is, in one sense, a coming-of-age novel, one that is deeply marked by grief and one that endeavours to explore with ceaseless honesty what loss—and love—can do to a child and the adult they go on to become—imagine a time-lapse video of a heartbreak. But it also brings us to head with the fact that grief can often make us focus on the wrong things, ask the wrong questions, and colour a life the hue of the tragedy that came after it. Grief often makes us look at the person we lose through the lens of our own experiences; for Marianne this is her own post-partum psychosis seeming to reveal a reflection of her mother. As much as her story is about growing into and around one’s grief—being overwhelmed, transformed, and pursued by it—it is also about healing, and how it comes to pass in ways we may expect as well as those that we don’t.
Though the author here steeps us in the emotional landscape of a single character, the narrative—with the way in which it dissembles folk fairytales and uses poetry to epigraph each chapter—pushes us to consider the situation equally from the outside in, from the distinct worlds we come to the story from. It is a musical and melancholic tale, and one that I would encourage reading on those grounds alone. Let is surprise you and make you weep.
September 1, 2023
The Booker Prize longlist has a bit of a vibe this year. It’s full of grief for dead mothers, unreliable narration, quirky and/or traumatised children, and complex relationships. Of the books from the longlist I’ve read so far that have dabbled on these themes, Pearl does it the best. It’s a story about a lost mother, all the different kinds of grief and the way they manifest over time, and across generations. I found it stylistically effective without being tricksy. The narration is non-linear and unreliable in a way that allows Hughes to deliberately play with the concept of the fallibility of memory, without being gimmicky or too obscure. It was a story that made me feel so empathetic for all the flawed characters, without feeling like trauma-porn. It’s almost pitch perfect, the kind of read that might easily feel like 5 stars in a day or two.
September 10, 2023
She had circled the word Pearl and drawn an arrow into the margin where she wrote in capitals: CONSOLATIO. I didn’t know why she had missed off the last letter. But consolation was what I was looking for. I was ransacking her books for it. I was secretly collecting clothes from the drawers under her bed and keeping them under my pillow one at a time, trying to preserve the smell of cinnamon-soaked beads she kept in there with them. I was rubbing leaves from the garden into my palm, looking for the perfect spell of mint and pea-shoot and fresh onion, and when I pulled nettles instead, dragging the stinging side all the way up the stem between my fingers, I wrapped my hand in dock leaves and believed the stinging was a part of the magic. If I suffered enough I could make her reappear. Pearl was too hard for me to read.
Listening to Pearl on audiobook (because it was the only format in which I could get an early ARC), I agree with other reviewers who note that narrator Laura Brydon (who gives a marvellous performance) speaks with a smile in her voice, giving this melancholic meditation on memory and grief a wry, gallows humour vibe. I didn’t dislike the dissonance between voice and subject matter — and the playfulness in Brydon's voice as she recited rhymes and children’s songs did seem appropriate — but something in the voice did prevent me from emotionally connecting with the main character’s trauma; I was more amused (and there are several deliberately funny bits) than moved (despite the tragic bits), and something in that makes me want to round down to three rather than up to four stars. Still: a very interesting experience, and especially interesting for the further reading this prompted about author Siân Hughes (here’s a great, if spoilery, interview with the author) and what I learned about the medieavel poem “Pearl” that inspired this novel (and here’s an extract from Hughes’ favourite translation into modern English). Like with previous Booker Prize nominees (such as Reservoir 13, Lanny, or Treacle Walker), the Booker jury seems to have a soft spot for books that engage deeply with the British countryside and its folklore, and Hughes finds this soft spot with a draughty country home and its green garden and muddy riverbanks — all haunted by the absence of a mother who left one day and never came back. I’m certain this would be a different (better) reading experience with the written word, and while I did like this very much overall, I will round down to three stars. (Note: I listened to an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted [which I sourced from Google Books to get the punctuation right] may not be in their final forms.)
When I had Susannah, I looked over my shoulder for her, I looked up from my daughter’s new face and realised I was looking for my mother’s eyes to meet mine, to agree with me she was the fairest young maiden that ever was seen. I waited for her to join in the singing. I started looking around for her, and crying. The midwife asked if there was family history of post-partum psychosis. I said, no. Only grief. There’s a family history of grief. You can pass it on. Like immunity, in the milk. Like a song.
When Marianne was eight, her mother disappeared: leaving behind a husband, daughter, and infant son; never to return. As the police investigate the disappearance, Marianne will learn some of her mother’s secrets, and as the years go on, she’ll learn others as well. Even so: the absent mother will forever be a mystery and the greatest influence on Marianne’s life, and when the family is forced to relocate to the city to be closer to the father’s work (and child care), the loss of the family home and its property will create the second absence around which Marianne creates herself. Pearl, the novel, is told from Marianne’s POV, and as she recounts her sad childhood and troubled adolescence, it is immediately made clear that neither she nor the reader can quite trust her memories, but as she recalls a loving mother who sang her lullabies, read her children’s books, and told her the legends of the Green Children and the Little People, the mother seems but one more legend tied to the vacant rural landscape. Marianne becomes obsessed with working out the mystery of her mother’s absence by studying her annotated copy of the poem “Pearl” (about a father grieving his young daughter’s death) and she becomes a multimedia visual artist, illustrating scenes from the mediaeval epic. And when she gets older and becomes a mother herself, the post-partum psychosis Marianne suffers (as, apparently, Hughes did herself) gives her some possible insight into her mother’s unknowable mind; and makes her worry what damage she might be passing down to her own daughter.
As for format: Each chapter begins with a children’s rhyme (generally a dark one along the lines of, “Here comes a candle to light you to bed, and here comes a chopper to chop off your head”), and as Hughes explains in that interview cited above, they’re meant to act as “clips” to hold each chapter (or “pearl”) together; and when she repeats an early song in the last, climactic, chapter, it’s meant to link back to the beginning in a “rosary-like sequence”. There is something very interesting in this format — and in the variety of songs and stories and rhymes that link Marianne to her mother and to the landscape — and the rambling old house and the possibility of ghosts gives everything a Gothic tension. And again: I suspect this would have worked better for me had I read the written words.
Forgetting is not the worst thing. Remembering is not the worst thing either. The worst thing is when you have forgotten, and then you remember. It catches you out. You forgot for a moment, a day, a week, a month, but the effect is the same each time you remember. You feel it rushing back around your lymphatic system, and you remember the hurt. And there is a part of you that thinks, perhaps the pain is optional now? What might it be like to live without it? This is treachery. You hate yourself for it.
Marianne’s unreliable memory was an intriguing storytelling device, and the fact that the absence of her mother felt like a physical reality around which Marianne was moulding herself was very well done: this is a well-crafted, allusive work of literature — there’s so much in here with reference to the inspirational poem and the rhymes/legends and the idea of how the landscape and the “Mother” shapes you; and what happens when they are taken away — and while, more than anything, this felt like a meditation on grief (as is the poem “Pearl”), it’s the grief that didn’t touch me (in the audiobook format anyway), and I’m left impressed but cold. But as a debut author from an independent press, I’m happy that the Booker nomination is getting attention for Pearl and Hughes (and I wouldn’t be unhappy if this made the shortlist).
October 15, 2023
I must admit, I went in making some assumptions that were way off base. With that title – Pearl – and the blurb referencing a young girl and her mother, I assumed it was some kind of adaptation or allusion to The Scarlet Letter. If you’re assuming the same, let me disabuse you of that right now and save you a bit of confusion!
My full review of Pearl is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.
My full review of Pearl is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.
September 7, 2023
From the 2023 Booker Prize longlist, Sian Hughes' debut novel (she is also an award-winning poet) is a touching story of a mother’s post-partum disappearance and her daughter’s struggles to reckon with it. The author is English, and Laura Braydon gives the novel a charming reading.
August 16, 2023
Booker Book 2 of 13: 6/10. absolutely gorgeously written, with a rich use of English folklore. Suffered for me by being the 2nd dead mother book I read
in a row on the Booker List (and the drawing out of this trauma throughout a much longer book and much more adult narrator than Western Lane left me wishing the narrator would get it together a bit faster). The
meandering middle section loses its way a bit among cliches of troubled adolescence - this part didn’t feel fresh, unlike the dreamy childhood chapters that draw so well on ancient stories and rhymes. A love poem to English village life and folkways and motherhood. But not much in the way of plot, despite a few twists scattered along the way.
in a row on the Booker List (and the drawing out of this trauma throughout a much longer book and much more adult narrator than Western Lane left me wishing the narrator would get it together a bit faster). The
meandering middle section loses its way a bit among cliches of troubled adolescence - this part didn’t feel fresh, unlike the dreamy childhood chapters that draw so well on ancient stories and rhymes. A love poem to English village life and folkways and motherhood. But not much in the way of plot, despite a few twists scattered along the way.
September 15, 2023
One common aspect that has featured in the ten books I’ve read so far in this year’s Booker Longlist is the dead parent. Pearl is no exception but, at least, it’s tackled in an interesting way.
Pearl itself is an exploration of grief. The narrator, Marianne’s, mother disappears and she expresses her loss in different ways. In some cases she stays stuck in childhood and tries to find out as much as she can about her mother, eventually stumbling upon the medieval poem, Pearl, while rummaging through her mother’s personal items. The narrator tries to ‘absorb’ as much of the poem as she can, even incorporating it in her adult life.
Later on as Marianne moves from her childhood home and actually has to go to school, she finds it difficult to integrate, thus finding unsuitable friends, once again her mother in her mind as her more troublesome escapades include returning to her old house and trying to bring back her mother’s spirits. This pattern returns in her relationships and eventual motherhood.
Incorporating ghosts, fairy tales and nursery rhymes, Pearl is an original take on grief and it’s psychological affects. At times poetic and lyrical this is an unforgettable novel and a pleasure to read.
Pearl itself is an exploration of grief. The narrator, Marianne’s, mother disappears and she expresses her loss in different ways. In some cases she stays stuck in childhood and tries to find out as much as she can about her mother, eventually stumbling upon the medieval poem, Pearl, while rummaging through her mother’s personal items. The narrator tries to ‘absorb’ as much of the poem as she can, even incorporating it in her adult life.
Later on as Marianne moves from her childhood home and actually has to go to school, she finds it difficult to integrate, thus finding unsuitable friends, once again her mother in her mind as her more troublesome escapades include returning to her old house and trying to bring back her mother’s spirits. This pattern returns in her relationships and eventual motherhood.
Incorporating ghosts, fairy tales and nursery rhymes, Pearl is an original take on grief and it’s psychological affects. At times poetic and lyrical this is an unforgettable novel and a pleasure to read.
March 25, 2024
Oh my god I’m devastated!!! Marianne’s mother disappears when she’s 8 years old & Pearl shows how that loss radiates throughout her life. Actually gave me chills. I love my mom.
Edit: I have started crying about it since posting this review
Edit: I have started crying about it since posting this review
September 19, 2023
"Pearl" reads an awful lot like autofiction, a genre that tends to bore me. If the author's lightly fictionalized story isn't that interesting, imagine how dull the reality must be. But "Pearl" is that rare piece of autofic that has me wondering "why didn't the author write a memoir?" Because Ms. Hughes, or her avatar Marianne, has an engaging, vivid, brutally honest voice, and makes some valuable observations about grief, trauma and mental illness. Marianne is eight when her mother walks out of the house and never returns, and the rest of the book is so random and disjointed that it must be based on real experience. I kept trying to impose a plot, or at least some kind of narrative force, on the book, which kept resisting. There's a lesson in that.
August 6, 2023
Lol. Stale prose. An amorphous sense of nonstructure. Reflections on grief that amount to little. Gestures toward the Gothic that peter out prematurely. Nursery rhyme chapter epigraphs that seem to gesture at the idea that even jolly rhymes, like a life lived, can be rather twisted and turn toward the darkness among the gaeities. Who would have known? Moments humored me. Some chapters were pleasant. But I hope to find something more than "pleasant."
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October 31, 2023A quiet and lovely story.
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