Books by Siân Hughes
Pearl: A Novel
On Christmas night of 1998, Maria Meyers learns that her twenty-year-old daughter, Pearl, has chained herself outside the American embassy in Dublin, where she intends to starve herself to death. Although Maria was once a student radical and still proudly lives by her beliefs, gentle, book-loving Pearl has never been interested in politics–nor in the Catholicism her mother rejected years before. What, then, is driving her to martyr herself?
Shaken by this mystery, Maria and her childhood friend (and Pearl’s surrogate father), Joseph Kasperman, both rush to Pearl’s side. As Mary Gordon tells the story of the bonds among them, shetakes us deep into the labyrinths of maternal love, religious faith, and Ireland’s tragic history. Pearl is a grand and emotionally daring novel of ideas, told with the tension of a thriller.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Pearl: A Novel
LONG-LISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • Heartbreaking and redeeming, Pearl is the story of a young woman in a small English village who is struggling with the disappearance of her mother, what feels like a lifetime ago.
"A masterful novel, shot through with legend and song. It can be read on many levels: as a mystery, as a story of grief and healing, as a response to a poem. But most of all, it can be read as a story of love." —The Boston Globe
"A gorgeous, swirling, haunted and haunting potion of a book...How utterly moving, to be under its beautiful, artful spell." —Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers and This Other Eden
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 finds it difficult to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Yet, in one of her mother’s dusty old books, she discovers a medieval poem called Pearl, and, trusting in the promise of its consolation, it seems as if her life begins to parallel the poem's course.
But questions remain. Marianne is ever more tormented by the unmarked gravestone in the abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, and as her childhood home begins to crumble, the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. Can Marianne ever come to understand her mother’s choices? And will her own future as a mother help her find her peace?
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$17.00
Pearl: A novel
by Siân Hughes
Heartbreaking and redeeming, Pearl is the story of a young woman in a small English village who is struggling with the disappearance of her mother, what feels like a lifetime ago.
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 finds it difficult to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Yet, in one of her mother’s dusty old books, she discovers a medieval poem called Pearl, and, trusting in the promise of its consolation, it seems as if her life begins to parallel the poem's course.
But questions remain. Marianne is ever more tormented by the unmarked gravestone in the abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, and as her childhood home begins to crumble, the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. Can Marianne ever come to understand her mother’s choices? And will her own future as a mother help her find her peace?
Copies
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$25.00
No Such Thing as Monday - A Novel
by Siân Hughes
From a Booker Prize-longlisted author, a novel in which a woman tries to overcome her abusive past and find her estranged sister in a deeply moving and darkly funny quest for redemption
Foul-mouthed, scrappy, and self-destructive, Steffie is her own worst enemy. Sustained by her sardonic sense of humor, she spends her days working at a dry cleaner and tending to her ailing, impoverished, abusive father. She was always his favorite, a fact that leaves her racked with guilt; her sister, Caroline, who bore the brunt of his rage, fled when they were both teenagers.
When her father dies, Steffie sets out to find Caroline, seeking love and forgiveness in a world that has too often denied her both. Along the way, she must confront her own memories, and the choices that have brought her to this point.
Written in the working-class British realist tradition of Douglas Stuart and Andrea Arnold, No Such Thing as Monday cements Hughes’s reputation as an exceptional and compassionate chronicler of precarious and chaotic lives.
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$26.99