Leaving the World
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The compelling novel from the number 1 bestselling author of Five Days, The Moment and The Pursuit of Happiness.
On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents - she would never get married and she would never have children.
But life, as Jane discovers, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then she falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise - but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.
Just when Jane has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision - stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.
Like Kennedy's previous highly acclaimed novels, Leaving the World, speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Published to acclaim in the U.K. and France in 2009, Kennedy s ninth novel is a complex study of a line early in the book: nobody gets away lightly in life. On the morning after narrator Jane Howard s 13th birthday, her father, citing Jane s comment that No one s actually happy, walks out on the family. Jane shuts down emotionally, but excels academically and while at Harvard begins an affair with her married thesis adviser, David, which ends four years later when he s killed in an accident. Moving on from making big bucks in finance, Jane ends up teaching at a third-tier university in Boston where she falls in love and has a daughter with film archivist Theo, who along with his new paramour, cheats Jane out of most of her savings. Life only gets harder, until, just when Jane is ready to give up, she gets involved in a child-murder investigation in Calgary, Canada. Jane is a quintessential heroine who never makes excuses or wallows in self-pity, despite her grief. Episodically structured yet with a strong narrative drive, this is a book with lasting impact: powerful, provocative, and tender.
Customer Reviews
Leaving the world
Very good read. Refreshing to see someone reinventing herself, the resilience. Just loved it.