2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Longlist
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Narrator
Jane McDowell
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Length
5 hours 24 minutes
Language
English
Brought to you by Penguin.
A piercing story of thwarted love and true friendship from one of our greatest living writers
Marianne Clifford, 15, only child of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, Lal, falls helplessly and absolutely for Simon Hurst, 18, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But fate intervenes. Simon's plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together.
Narrating her own story, characterising herself as ignorant and unworthy, Marianne's telling use of irony and smart thinking gradually suggest to us that she has underestimated her own worth. We begin to believe that - in the end, supported by her courageous Scottish friend, Petronella - she will find the life she never stops craving. But what we can't envisage is that beneath his blithe exterior, Simon Hurst has been nursing a secret which will alter everything.
©2023 Rose Tremain (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Rose Tremain's novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won many awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Femina in France (Sacred Country) and the South Bank Sky Arts Award (The Gustav Sonata). Her most recent novel is Lily, a Richard and Judy Book Club selection. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007 and a Dame in 2020. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.
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Audiobook details
Author:
Rose Tremain
Narrator:
Jane McDowell
ISBN:
9781529910810
Length:
5 hours 24 minutes
Language:
English
Publisher:
Random House
Publication date:
September 21, 2023
Edition:
Unabridged
Reviews
An electrifying, word-perfect tale… Gently devastating, devastatingly beautiful An engrossing character study ... But it is also a study in tolerance and kindness, and as such is more relevant to today’s reader than it might first seem Written with piercing clarity and gentle humour, Absolutely And Forever is a study of the messiness of human relationships, the significance of secrets unspoken and the impact of the choices we make This is a book about the comic, painful, life-long search for human understanding. Not a word is wasted; not a phrase trite. It is mesmerising, masterly and profoundly moving Rose Tremain… is back on form with Absolutely and ForeverPRAISE FOR ABSOLUTELY AND FOREVER:
'Stunningly beautiful and deeply moving'
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