The World Before Us: A Novel

by Aislinn Hunter Narrated by Fiona Hardingham

Overview

In the tradition of A. S. Byatt's Possession, a hauntingly poignant novel about madness, loss, and the ties that bind our past to our present
*
Deep in the woods of northern England, somewhere between a dilapidated estate and an abandoned Victorian asylum, fifteen-year-old Jane Standen lived through a nightmare. *She was babysitting a sweet young girl named Lily, and in one fleeting moment, lost her. The little girl was never found, leaving her family and Jane devastated.

Twenty years later, Jane is an archivist at a small London museum that is about to close for lack of funding. As a final research project--an endeavor inspired in part by her painful past--Jane surveys the archives for information related to another missing person: a woman who disappeared over one hundred years ago in the same woods where Lily was lost. As Jane pieces moments in history together, a portrait of a fascinating group of people starts to unfurl. Inexplicably tied to the mysterious disappearance of long ago, Jane finds tender details of their lives at the country estate and in the asylum that are linked to her own heartbroken world, and their story from all those years ago may now help Jane find a way to move on.

In riveting, beautiful prose, The World Before Us explores the powerful notion that history is a closely connected part of us--kept alive by the resonance of our daily choices--reminding us of the possibility that we are less alone than we might think.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2015 - AudioFile

Although many of the characters in this novel are ghosts, narrator Fiona Hardingham holds the mystical aspects of the tale in check by her gentle, careful performance. Twenty years ago, Jane was babysitting a young girl who disappeared into the woods. Now working at a small museum, Jane researches the disappearance of a woman into those same woods one hundred years earlier. The ghosts of the past are literally around Jane, and listeners hear them bringing a sense of history to the narrative. Hardingham performs them as people who are as real as Jane, since that’s how they see themselves. Hunter characterizes Jane as a person of deep introspection, and Hardingham narrates with thoughtful deliberateness. Her sedate pace keeps this magical book sounding true to life. G.D. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

01/26/2015
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. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

Praise for The World Before Us

"A complex, subtle, and utterly haunting meditation on memory, history, and mortality. This book is magnificent."—Emily St. John Mandel, author of National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Bestseller Station Eleven

"Daring and mesmerizing. A haunting, irresistible story and an urgent mystery about what it means to pass through this life.  Hunter has a poet's eye and ear, and she goes after the elusive - the waywardness of memory, the grief of random loss, the yearning of existence - in an unfolding drama that is absorbing, luminous and powerfully human."—Alison MacLeod, Man Booker Prize-nominated author of Unexploded

“Haunting…a compelling exploration of how memory shapes and is shaped by individuals and society.” —Kirkus

“Haunting…an emotionally and intellectually satisfying journey in the manner of A.S. Byatt’s Possession…[The World Before Us] movingly dramatizes how unknowable the past can be.” – Publishers Weekly 

"The World Before Us is a powerful balancing act...It is a novel of considerable beauty, threaded with violence and pain, a melancholic book with moments of grace and joy. It is a thought-provoking novel, haunting and haunted, rooted in the power of history and of the individuals within it, and outside it. Reminiscent of A.S. Byatt’s Possession, it is the sort of novel which forces you to look at the world – the people around you, the objects they hold dear – in a different light."—Globe and Mail

“An ambitious new novel about the vitality of objects and history’s knack for bleeding into the present. Intricate in both expression and construction, and dense in thematic implication, The World Before Us cleverly innovates while tipping a nod to classic Gothic tropes: dynastic rivalries, crumbling country houses, madhouses and vanished girls. Hunter is less tempted by spooky thrills than the chance to explore ways in which human affection resonates across time.”—National Post

"A haunting tale of loss and reconciliation...The novel's three timelines are deftly woven together, illustrating the ways life takes on meaning even through objects and places. Hunter refers to history as 'a shifting trickster' and uses that premise to hook readers, as they...embark on a quest for meaning and truth in the face of tragedy."— Chatelaine

"Intricately composed and gripping…With The World Before Us, [Hunter] has created her most ambitious and original work.”—Quill and Quire

“Once in a rare while a novel comes along to remind us of what great fiction can do: creating a world so sublimely felt that, for the hours we spend reading, we are lifted out of our own lives, and when we return we find ourselves immeasurably altered and enriched. The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter is such a novel. It is a brilliant work of humanity and imagination, artful and breathtakingly beautiful, and it will continue to haunt long after you have finished reading.” —Helen Humphreys, author of The Lost Garden and Coventry

"A richly layered narrative harmonizing the past and present, dissolving the boundaries of time frames and showing the possible conneciton between people and places and objects...The World Before Us is a well-constructed and thoughtful novel on serious subjects. The historical detail never overwhelms; instead it brings alive the past and shows the seamlessness of past and present, espeically the human need for contact, which transcends time and place."—The Vancouver Sun

Praise for Aislinn Hunter's Stay

"Stay's rigorous examination of the relationship between colonialism, globalization, and identity places it in the company of Michael Ondaatje . . . Controlled, smart, and humane."—Quill and Quire

"For all the complexity in Hunter's rich book . . . there is also a minute attention to detail and an elegance in the natural dialogue. Hunter hangs ideas on you, ideas you want to stop and think about, in such a subtle, tender way."—Michelle Berry, Globe and Mail

JULY 2015 - AudioFile

Although many of the characters in this novel are ghosts, narrator Fiona Hardingham holds the mystical aspects of the tale in check by her gentle, careful performance. Twenty years ago, Jane was babysitting a young girl who disappeared into the woods. Now working at a small museum, Jane researches the disappearance of a woman into those same woods one hundred years earlier. The ghosts of the past are literally around Jane, and listeners hear them bringing a sense of history to the narrative. Hardingham performs them as people who are as real as Jane, since that’s how they see themselves. Hunter characterizes Jane as a person of deep introspection, and Hardingham narrates with thoughtful deliberateness. Her sedate pace keeps this magical book sounding true to life. G.D. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2015-01-08
Hunter's haunting—if sometimes elusive—second novel (Stay, 2005) wavers between practical life in the present and the unplumbed memories of a British archivist and her long-dead research subjects.Twenty years ago, 15-year-old Jane was babysitting Lily when the 5-year-old went missing in some English woodland between the Whitmore, an abandoned Victorian mental asylum, and Inglewood House, the former estate of 19th-century plant hunter George Farrington. Now Jane is an archivist at the Chester Museum in London, founded in 1868 by Edmund Chester, whose wife, Charlotte, hinted in her diary of a romantic attachment with George's brother Norvill Farrington. Jane has never truly recovered from Lily's unsolved disappearance, guilt tangling with her confused adolescent attraction toward Lily's widowed father, William. When she hears William speak at the Chester about his new book concerning George Farrington, unresolved feelings well up, and Jane runs away to revisit the site of Lily's disappearance. She is not alone: A chorus of stranded souls follows her. Having found Jane while she was researching the Whitmore logbook for her graduate school dissertation years ago, they hope she will lead them to remember their lives and especially deaths. In those logbooks, Jane stumbled across another disappearance in the area a hundred years before Lily's: a woman identified only as N. Having Jane try to solve the two unconnected disappearances, the author transforms Jane the archivist into Jane the detective. But like other fictional detectives, and despite her sizzling romance with an inappropriately young gardener, Jane is never as interesting as those she unwittingly investigates—a host of spirits with unresolved deaths who share stories heartbreaking in their complicated humanness, from the farmer who's more bird than man to the barely closeted schoolmaster to the lawyer blaming himself for his infant's death to Norvill Farrington, whose desperate love for the ambivalent Charlotte causes disaster. Not an easy read but a compelling exploration of how memory shapes and is shaped by individuals and society.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171962319
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	03/31/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos