The World Before Us
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The brilliant, hauntingly beautiful second novel, twelve years in the making, from a writer whose previous novel Stay was a Globe and Mail Top 100 pick, a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, and made into a feature film.
When she was just fifteen, smart, sensitive Jane Standen lived through a nightmare: she lost the sweet five-year-old girl she was minding during a walk in the woods. The little girl was never found, leaving her family, and Jane, devastated. Now the grown-up Jane is an archivist at a small London museum that is about to close for lack of funding. As her one last project, she is searching the archives for scraps of information related to another missing person--a woman who disappeared some 125 years ago from a Victorian asylum. As the novel moves back and forth between the museum in contemporary London, the Victorian asylum, and a dilapidated country house that seems to connect both missing people, it unforgettably explores the repercussions of small acts, the power of affection, and the irrepressible vitality of everyday objects and events.
Here is a rivetting, gorgeously written novel that powerfully reminds us of the possibility that we are less alone than we might think.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hunter's (Stay) haunting new novel, Jane Standen was a babysitter in her teens when five-year-old Lily Eliot disappeared on her watch. Now, 20 years later, Jane is an archivist at London's Chester Museum, which is due to close. While doing research on Victorian-era rural asylums, Jane comes across a reference to the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics and a young woman called N, who, back in 1877, disappeared in the same woods where Lily vanished. After a confrontation at the museum with Lily's father, William Eliot, a botanist who has written a book on Victorian plant hunters, Jane flees to the north of England to find out what happened to N. Her research shows that N's fate was inextricably linked to that of George Farrington, a botanist whose estate was located near the asylum. Farrington also had links to the Chesters, who founded the museum where Jane works. Jane goes into the woods, hoping to make sense of things. Narrated by a chorus of ghosts and featuring a romance with a hunky young gardener at the estate, Jane's story is an emotionally and intellectually satisfying journey in the manner of A.S. Byatt's Possession and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. And like those two works' juxtaposition of past and present, this one movingly dramatizes how unknowable the past can be.
