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![The Hand That First Held Mine (English Edition) par [Maggie O'Farrell]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41V2Osd1WDL._SY346_.jpg)
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Lexie Sinclair is plotting an extraordinary life for herself.
Hedged in by her parents' genteel country life, she plans her escape to London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who wears duck-egg blue ties and introduces her to the thrilling, underground world of bohemian, post-war Soho. She learns to be a reporter, to know art and artists, to embrace her life fully and with a deep love at the center of it. She creates many lives--all of them unconventional. And when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn't hesitate to have the baby on her own.
Later, in present-day London, a young painter named Elina dizzily navigates the first weeks of motherhood. She doesn't recognize herself: she finds herself walking outside with no shoes; she goes to the restaurant for lunch at nine in the morning; she can't recall the small matter of giving birth. But for her boyfriend, Ted, fatherhood is calling up lost memories, with images he cannot place.
As Ted's memories become more disconcerting and more frequent, it seems that something might connect these two stories-- these two women-- something that becomes all the more heartbreaking and beautiful as they all hurtle toward its revelation.
Here Maggie O'Farrell brings us a spellbinding novel of two women connected across fifty years by art, love, betrayals, secrets, and motherhood. Like her acclaimed The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, it is a "breathtaking, heart-breaking creation."* And it is a gorgeous inquiry into the ways we make and unmake our lives, who we know ourselves to be, and how even our most accidental legacies connect us.
*The Washington Post Book World
- LangueAnglais
- ÉditeurMariner Books
- Date de publication25 janvier 2011
- Taille du fichier1335 KB
Description du produit
Critique
'Like Daphne du Maurier...O'Farrell writes books designed to...bring our most primal fears to the surface' ( Daily Mail )
'O'Farrell is a skilful, impassioned writer...engaging and fluent' ( Sunday Telegraph )
'Genuinely unputdownable...evidence of her place as one of Britain's most engaging contemporary novelists' ( Literary Review ) --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.
Revue de presse
Biographie de l'auteur
Maggie O'Farrell is the author of several novels, including her debut novel, After You'd Gone, which won a Betty Trask Award; The Distance between US, winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; and The Hand That First Held Mine, winner of the Costa Novel Award. She has worked as the deputy literary editor of the London Independent on Sunday.
Anne Flosnik, a seasoned audiobook narrator, has over four hundred titles to her credit and several awards and distinctions, including AudioFile Earphones Awards, a USA Today Recommended Listening selection, an AudioFile Best Narration of the Year selection in 2009, and the American Library Association's Special Services to Children Award. She has also been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She is an award-winning British actress with lead credits on stage, on television, and in commercials and voice-overs.
--Ce texte fait référence à l'édition kindle_edition.Détails sur le produit
- ASIN : B0039W58L2
- Éditeur : Mariner Books; First édition (25 janvier 2011)
- Langue : Anglais
- Taille du fichier : 1335 KB
- Synthèse vocale : Activée
- Lecteur d’écran : Pris en charge
- Confort de lecture : Activé
- X-Ray : Activé
- Word Wise : Activé
- Nombre de pages de l'édition imprimée : 354 pages
- Classement des meilleures ventes d'Amazon : 104,889 en Boutique Kindle (Voir les 100 premiers en Boutique Kindle)
- 1,318 en Historical Fiction
- 1,668 en Literature
- 3,065 en Littérature anglaise (Livres)
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Le thème de la perte est un thème récurrent dans les livres de cette auteur, abordé avec beaucoup de pudeur mais aussi beaucoup de justesse. Inconsciemment, les larmes montent aux yeux, mais tout le savoir faire de l'auteur fait que jamais on ne tombe dans la sensiblerie.
Dans ce roman elle alterne, chapitre après chapitre, deux histoires que 50 ans séparent, et qui, en apparence, n'ont pas grand chose en commun.
Au fil des pages, sa plume campe de manière subtile et attachante les personnages de Lexie, Innes, Ted et Elina.
A mesure qu'ils gagnent en épaisseur, les fils du scénario se dénouent dans un final captivant.
Relativement facile à lire
374 pages
Recommandé par o'bEiNGLISH
J'ai adoré cette histoire. Maggie O'Farrell n'a pas sa pareille pour nous faire pénétrer dans l'intimité de ses personnages et nous faire vibrer au rythmes de leurs émotions. C'est la 1ère fois que je lis un de ses livres en anglais, et c'est encore mieux ! Alors lancez-vous !
Meilleurs commentaires provenant d’autres pays

Her use of language is delicious. I look up and several days have passed, unnoticed, because I've been completely absorbed. There is poetry and pathos galore and I know her characters inside out because, with the description of a look or the movement of a hand, I know everything about them. She has such a gift for observation.
In The Hand That First Held Mine, we meet two women, separated by time.
Lexie is an outgoing young woman in the 1950s. She leaves Devon for London, almost on the spur of the moment, as is captivated by Soho and a very charming man called Innes. Lexie is very forward-thinking and has a fair few relationships which would shock and alarm her parents, if they were still speaking to her. However, she has that gutsy, get-on-with-it attitude which I so admire.
Elina is a Finn, living in modern London with her chap. When we first meet her, she is astonished to find herself with a baby. She has been pregnant, she remembers much of the pregnancy, the shopping, the books she has read, her excitement, but she has missed the birth. Her chap, Ted, has watched a harrowing birth and the near-loss of his girlfriend and, as the story moves forward, is unsettled by long-lost memories of his own childhood, which have only come back to him in pieces, since the birth of his son.
I suspect much of the stories, as regards babies and the anxieties of motherhood, would resonate more with parents. I don't fall into that bracket but the writing kept me on the edge of my seat. I'll not ruin the story for you but it's a tremendous read. At the end, I sat back, breathless. Read this.

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.
We begin on the border of Devon and Cornwall in the mid 1950s. It is late summer and 21 year old Alexandra is at home having been sent down from University for leaving through the door marked for men. She is cross. She is frustrated. She despises her family - her mother in particular. She sits under the tree and reads. Then a man, Innes Kent, passing in his car, spots her and is immediately entranced by the beautiful composition she makes, a "rural madonna." "Life," as Alexandra knows it, "is about to begin."
We then move about 50 years forward to the present day and the story of Elina, a Finnish artist living in England who had a baby 4 days ago but has lost all memory of it. The birth was problematic, traumatic and involved operations and a blood transfusion. She now finds her self weak and frequently falling asleep; these "lapses as she likes to think of them, are like the needle on a record player...leaping from one song to another," or that her life has "sprung 400 holes." I found the descriptions of Elina really entrancing. O'Farrell captures the fugue like moments and evokes the confusion, tiredness, dreamlike mental state really effectively in a way that mimics Elina's mind. Her mediative reflections about what is happening to her were well written. Elina describes her voice as "drowsy, vague as if at any moment it might wander out of the range of sense." I think this is one of my favourite lines in the whole book. It truly encapsulates the first few days of motherhood (and possibly the next decade!) but also the internal struggle that Elina is enduring as she tries to reconcile herself with who she has become and tries to remember or reconnect with her previous identity. She feels so removed from her life before the baby; she wishes she was still pregnant, still complete.
Her husband Ted is also haunted by memories. The memories his mother speaks of don't seem connected to him. His childhood was one of "absent parents" and completely different to that of Elina's past of freedom and adventurous outdoor games. He vows to be a better father to his child. Both characters in this storyline are used to explore themes of memory, forgetfulness and dreams, and both characters feel like they are trapped within some kind of trance from which they have to be released.
There is some beautiful writing in this novel. I found the passages about Elina quite soporific. I liked sentences such as "there are better things to do with your life. If only she could remember what they are." How she feels she could "float up and disappear into the clouds" but another part of her is "tethered to the house." I loved the descriptions of their house and life with a brand new baby:
"there isn't a surface that isn't covered with the flotsam and jetsam of the day; nappies washed up all over the floor, coffee cups on tables, a breast pump on the television."
O'Farrell's attention to the minutiae is so convincing that it is incredibly easy to visualise everything. She subtly conveys character and emotions to the reader through the details she chooses to draw to our eye. When Elina first returns to her studio to paint and her mother in law barges in, completely oblivious to the sacrosanct space and organisation of the room - not to mention the significance of the fact Elina finds herself able to paint again - the tension and emotion of each character is very well caught. There is such power in what is left unsaid; what is implied, what we can see going on underneath the surface. The scene is depicted with such clarity and thoroughness that is vivid- full of colour and noise. O'Farrell's writing is not arduous or prolonged, or overwritten, but it is perceptive and shows someone who is full of experience in making excellent observations of people and life. Another wonderful scene is the description of the Blue Lagoon Cafe:
"Cups and glasses stand inverted on the draining board, tepid water slides off them to pool in circles around their rims. the floor is swept but not very well...there is a focaccia crust under table 4 dropped by a tourist from Maine;....the cafe listens attentively.....as if sensing the night time calm, the refrigerator obligingly shudders into silence."
Oh yes, the English Teacher in me was desperate to photocopy and present to students, to all get out our highlighter pens and pull some of these paragraphs to shreds. What a luxury to just be able to appreciate exquisite imagery and lovely writing.
There are many references to film in the story. There is a great passage when we actually watch Alexandra - or Lexie as she becomes- life rewind back in slow motion to the point at which we left it. There is a moment when Ted "rolls the film forwards and backwards" during work editing a real film reel but metaphorically this shows the lack of control in his own life and how he teeters between decisions and paths. The use of film as a metaphor also puts the reader in the position as an observer. The narrator often refers to "we" which encourages a relationship between reader and narrator but also the sense that we are both watching a film or play unfold in front of us. We are detached but involved. Similar to film there is a continuous reference to the sea. Both metaphors perhaps encapsulate the sense of fluidity, movement backwards and forwards, a trance like- hypnotic swaying as we are carried along through life. The two story lines work well together as one is reflects on a life lost, one on a life found. Both about new life. It is not lost on me that in one scene a magazine was left open at a headline "How to Become Someone Else".
Lexie's storyline is much more active and action packed than Elina and Ted's narrative and this also provides a good contrast. It is impossible not to like Lexie. She is ruthless, irksome, prickly and a workaholic. She is feisty, bold, inspiring, ambitious. Her sections are often wry and full of character in a way the other storyline is more placid and passive. But she is sensitive and caring. She is flawed but easy to empathise with. I loved the sentence describing her leaving for work and leaving her son behind for the day:
"As she walks away through the streets she is aware of the thread between her and her son unspooling, bit by bit. By the end of the day she feels utterly unravelled."
The ending is emotive, evocative and powerful. It is gentle but still full of drama. There is suspense and tension but understated. The reader is completely caught up in the atmosphere of the novel. It is a book to read slowly and to savour. The voices of the characters are exceptionally well captured and it is sad but not sentimental. It was like watching a play.
Although the two story lines do converge and connect, which is enlightening and adds further depth to the characters, for me it was not really what the story was about. For me, I was motivated to keep turning the page because of the believable, troubled characters each searching for who they are, their lost self, how they were going to define their role as a mother, a wife -a lover. How each of them, the women and the men, were on a journey of self discovery and to become reconciled with their own true identity.
I would recommend this book. It's a 4/5 star rating from me.
I would also recommend "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox" and "Instructions for a Heatwave". Her latest book "This Must be the Place" has also received fantastic reviews.
For more recommendations and reviews please follow me on Twitter @katherinesunde3 (bibliomaniacUK) or subscribe by email to receive future posts.

The characters are crafted so well (although I was so bowled over by Lexie that I slightly hated her for her brilliance), and the shattering, all-consuming onslaught of early parenthood is described so beautifully. I felt that the ending couldn’t possibly be a twist, as one reviewer has mentioned, as I thought that the way the stories were laid out invited you in on the “secret”. I was disappointed by one aspect of that secret, but won’t give any spoilers here. I just can’t help saying, I think Felix is a brilliantly created disappointment of a man.
I listened to a talk once by Kazuo Ishiguro, where he spoke about one of his chief goals being to create characters that last in the readers’ memory, long after they’ve finished the book. I think one of the reasons I enjoy reading O’Farrell’s books so much is that you get a firm, coherent grip on her characters, and so far, many have stayed with me.
Absolute page-turner. Off to find more of O’Farrell’s books to read.

