Perfect
The compelling and emotional Sunday Times bestseller
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Tense and engrossing... readers who loved The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry will not be disappointed.' - Sunday Times
'An instant classic.' - Daily Express
'You will end up grinning dippily and recommending this wild, searching book to everyone you know.' - The Times
'Brilliantly realized... a powerful study of grief, loss, guilt, depression, mental illness - and ultimately the power of love - which grips the reader on every page.' - Daily Mail
Summer, 1972: Two seconds have been added to the Atomic clock so as to counteract the irregularities in the Earth's rate of rotation. Eleven-year-old Byron has been told this but still struggles to understand. What might it mean? In the claustrophobic heat, he and his friend begin ‘Operation Perfect’, a hapless mission to rescue Byron’s mother from impending crisis.
Winter, present day: As frost creeps across the moor, Jim cleans tables in the local café, a solitary figure struggling with OCD. His job is a relief from the rituals that govern his nights.
Little would seem to connect them except that two seconds can change everything.
If your world can be shattered in an instant, might time also put things right?
RACHEL JOYCE'S MOST RECENT NOVEL - THE HOMEMADE GOD - IS OUT NOW FROM DOUBLEDAY
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An 11-year-old boy makes an error that brings tragedy to several lives, including his own, in Joyce's intriguing and suspenseful novel. One summer day in a small English village in 1972, Byron Hemmings's mother, Diana, is driving him and his younger sister to school when their Jaguar hits a little girl on a red bicycle. Diana drives on, unaware, with only Byron having seen the accident. Byron doesn't know whether or not the girl was killed, however, and concocts a plan called "Operation Perfect" to shield his mother from what happened. Previously, she has always presented the picture of domestic perfection in trying to please her martinet banker husband, Seymour, and overcome her lower-class origins. After Byron decides to tell her the truth about the accident, she feverishly attempts to make amends by befriending the injured girl's mother, but her "perfect" facade begins to splinter. Joyce sometimes strains credibility in describing Diana's psychological deterioration, but the novel's fast pacing keeps things tense. Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, Jim, a psychologically fragile man in his 50s, endures a menial cafe job. Joyce, showing the same talent for adroit plot development seen in the bestselling The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, brings both narrative strands together in a shocking, redemptive (albeit weepily sentimental) denouement. The novel is already a bestseller in England.
