The Chosen: who pays the price of a writer's fame?
Elizabeth Lowry
Apr 2022 · riverrun · Narrated by Philip Bird
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9 hr 29 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
One Wednesday morning in November 1912 Thomas Hardy, an old man in ragged trousers, entombed by paper and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms she has gone.
The day before he and Emma had exchanged bitter words, leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives ended up as enemies to each other. He, his family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he had been in a relationship, all assumed that he would be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.
Hardy finds a set of secret diaries Emma kept about their life together and discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why had they ever married?
He is consumed by something worse than grief, an absence without form or meaning, a chaos in which certainties have been obliterated. He must re-evaluate himself and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.
Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has made - and must now make - form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. Based on meticulous research, The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and grief; life and art.
(P)2022 Quercus Editions Limited
The day before he and Emma had exchanged bitter words, leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives ended up as enemies to each other. He, his family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he had been in a relationship, all assumed that he would be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.
Hardy finds a set of secret diaries Emma kept about their life together and discovers what Emma had truly felt - that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why had they ever married?
He is consumed by something worse than grief, an absence without form or meaning, a chaos in which certainties have been obliterated. He must re-evaluate himself and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.
Hardy's pained reflections on the choices he has made - and must now make - form a unique combination of love story and ghost story, by turns tender, surprising, comic and true. Based on meticulous research, The Chosen - the extraordinary new novel by Elizabeth Lowry - hauntingly searches the unknowable spaces between man and wife; memory and grief; life and art.
(P)2022 Quercus Editions Limited
One Wednesday morning in November 1912 Thomas Hardy, an old man in ragged trousers, entombed by paper and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms she has gone.
The day before he and Emma had exchanged bitte...
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About the author
Elizabeth Lowry was born in Washington, DC and educated in South Africa and England. She lives and works in Oxford. Her first novel, The Bellini Madonna, was published in 2008 to great acclaim; her second, Dark Water, was published in 2018 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. She is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal.
Elizabeth Lowry was born in Washington, DC and educated in South Africa and England. She lives and works in Oxford. Her first novel, The Bellini Madonna, was published in 2008 to great acclaim; her second, Dark Water, was published in 2018 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical ...
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