Waterstones The Hero of this Book
279 ratings
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Price: £14.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: Ten months after her mother's death, the narrator of The Hero of This Book walks across London on a quiet Sunday. The city was a favourite of her mother's, and as the narrator wanders the streets, she finds herself reflecting on her mother's life and their relationship. Thoughts of the past meld with questions of the future: back in New England, the family home is now up for sale, its considerable contents already winnowed. The woman, a writer, recalls all that made her complicated mother extraordinary - her brilliant wit, her generosity, her unbelievable obstinacy, her sheer will in seizing life despite physical difficulties - and finds herself wondering how her mother had endured. Even though she wants to respect her mother's nearly pathological sense of privacy, the woman must come to terms with whether making a chronicle of this remarkable life constitutes an act of love or betrayal. The Hero of This Book is a searing examination of grief and renewal, and of a deeply felt relationship between a child and her parents. At once comic and heartbreaking, with prose that surprises at every turn, this is a novel of such piercing love and tenderness that we are reminded that art is what remains when all else falls away. Waterstones The Hero of this Book - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781787334281
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781787334281
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Author: Ernest Lilley
Rating: 5
Review: A writer travels to London to mourn/discover/bury her mother, dead now for 10 months. The author claims, with great frequency, that it's not a memoir, no matter how much it seems like one. The lady doth protesteth... The unnamed narrator is a modified version of the actual author, McCracken tells us in a fourth wall breaking aside to the reader. I read the book cold, with no previous knowledge of the author's work or life, and was willing to believe her, but really hoping that this secondary narrator, the actual author popping up from time to time, was an unreliable narrator...and that she'd made it all up whole cloth because if she had, it's pretty amazing worldbuilding. You're on your own for finding the answer to that. The protagonist, who may or may not be the hero of the book, if indeed such a thing even exists, is a writer in her late 50s whose mother has died almost a year before and has been taking care of all the details involved. What she isn't is ready to close the lid on her mother's life, and she's gone to London, where they went together three years earlier, and wanders around the town, rabbit holes of recollection looming like open manhole covers on the streets they'd trod together. It's not a memoir, she asserts. No, it's an exercise in self-indulgence and grieving. I say that like it's a bad thing, but it's not. The fictional author is out there processing grief in a melancholy travelogue of a city they shared as she looks for the mother of her memory in museums and theaters, both of which her mother had loved until at last she can accept that its time to open the collection of photos the realtor has sent her, showing a house far too neat, far too empty, and accept that her mother is gone. Anyone who's dealt with the decline of an aging relative will find this resonant, and as to whether it's fact or fiction, as an instructor in a writing class tells the protagonist in the book, “If I know one thing, it’s that it doesn’t make any difference. Call it what you want.”
Author: Louie Louie
Rating: 1
Review: After reading the Washington Post review, I was so excited about reading this book. Well, what a disappointment. As I read page after page, I began to feel like someone who is socially forced to listen to a blabber and starts despairing when they see there is no end in sight.
