Flora
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin's penetrating and haunting narrative about intimacy and loss and remorse, set against a background of world-changing events
'The perfect summer read can come in unexpected guises ... Dive into its deep waters and witness a novelist at the peak of her powers' The Times
'A beautiful examination of character and the far reaching repercussions of our actions. Gail Godwin brings grace, honesty, and enormous intelligence to every page' Ann Patchett
Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's dilapidated family home while her father is doing secret war work during the final months of the Second World War.
At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.
Their relationship and its fallout, played against the backdrop of a lost America, will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Narrator Helen Anstruther, "going on eleven," is the relentlessly charismatic and wry star of this stirring and wondrous novel from Godwin (Unfinished Desires). In the summer of 1945, in the mountains of North Carolina, Helen is trying to make sense of the world since her beloved grandmother's death. When her father leaves to do "secret work for World War II" in neighboring Tennessee, this becomes much more challenging, and Helen, motherless for years, is left in the care of 22-year-old Flora, a delicate and, Helen might say, hopelessly effusive relative. Helen has grown up in a rambling old house that once served as a home for convalescent tubercular or inebriate "Recoverers" under the care of Helen's physician grandfather. For a precocious girl who has lost everyone who's ever loved and known her, the house becomes a mesmerizing and steadfast companion. Though Flora initially appears to Helen as little more than a country bumpkin, their time together profoundly transforms them both. Godwin's thoughtful portrayal of their boredom, desires, and the eventual heartbreak of their summer underscores the impossible position of children, who are powerless against the world and yet inherit responsibility for its agonies.
