Rating:
(14 reviews)
Author: Visit Amazon's Morag Joss Page
ISBN : 0385342764
New from $18.30
Format: PDF, EPUB
Direct download links available Epub Our Picnics in the Sun: A Novel Hardcover from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
Review
Praise for Our Picnics in the Sun “The British writer’s latest is a psychological dazzler.”
—Entertainment WeeklyPraise for Morag Joss’s Among the Missing “This remarkable novel has an abundance of suspense at its core, put forth in beautiful prose that all but glows on the page. . . . [Joss] keeps a jittery tension going as the novel spins toward its violent, grand-scaled finale.”
—Booklist (starred review) “A haunting, harrowing punch to the heart,
Among the Missing is flat-out brilliant. About the secrets we keep, the lives we are desperate to live, and the chances we miss, it’s a psychological dazzler. Truly, one of my favorite books of this year—or any year.”
—Caroline Leavitt, author of Is This Tomorrow “Morag Joss is a writer who knows the old truth that genuine suspense comes not from car chases or gunplay but from the clash of conflicting hearts.
Among the Missing is evidence not of a rising talent but of one already fully formed.”
—Thomas H. Cook, author of Sandrine’s Case “A spectacular psychological thriller . . . Joss’s beautiful, evocative novel is filled with tension and suspense.”
—RT Book Reviews About the Author
Morag Joss is the author of several novels, including
Among the Missing and the CWA Silver Dagger winner
Half Broken Things, which was also adapted as a film for U.K. national television. In 2008 she was the recipient of a Heinrich Böll Fellowship, and in 2009 she was nominated for an Edgar Award for her sixth novel,
The Night Following.
Direct download links available for Epub Our Picnics in the Sun: A Novel
- Hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Delacorte Press (November 26, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385342764
- ISBN-13: 978-0385342766
- Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Epub Our Picnics in the Sun: A Novel
A bursting blood vessel in Howard Morgan's head and his wife's fall from a ladder set the stage in Our Picnics in the Sun, Morag Joss' story of an aging couple in South West England. The action resumes three years later. Point of view shifts between Howard, who struggles with speech and mobility, and Deborah, who is neglecting their sheep and barely tending to Stoneyridge, their decaying bed-and-breakfast. We also see Howard and Deborah from the point of view of Adam, their 28-year-old son working abroad, who is determined to avoid them as much as he can. An unexpected guest named Theo seeks accommodation at Stoneyridge on Adam's birthday and eventually insinuates himself into the Morgan family drama, sparking changes in the attitudes and interactions of the Morgan clan while forcing Deborah (and, indirectly, Howard) to confront the feelings they have kept hidden from each other, and possibly from themselves, since Adam's birth.
Our Picnics in the Sun is about the essential role that kind treatment of our children and parents and spouses plays in a healthy existence. But the novel also helps us understand why kindness so easily disappears, why we sometimes struggle to bestow it upon the people we love. Neither Howard nor Deborah are ideal parents or spouses, and Adam is less than an ideal son, but it is easy to feel sympathy for all of them. Howard, a controlling twit who has devoted much of his self-absorbed spiritualistic life to bearing a well-deserved sense of guilt, is now a mind trapped in a dysfunctional body, incapable of articulating his thoughts, often experiencing inexpressible hunger and cold, regretting all the years that he refused to notice Deborah "fading and slipping away from him.
Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss is a book that focuses on a few important aspects of life and family. There are three stories happening: the dynamic between Howard and Deborah, the distance communication between Deborah and Adam, and the commentary on the life of a caretaker in a family ill-equipped to handle emergency situations. Of the three, the one that broke my heart the most was the distance communication between Deborah and Adam, her son - but the combination of the three made for a powerful story, one that I both dreaded and ached to pick up ... just so I could find out what happened next.
Deborah and Howard are an older couple with an adult son. Free-thinkers, Deborah has always followed Howard's lead. Howard is an artist and has some interesting thoughts on everything from bread-baking to where a woman should give birth. But now, Howard is not able to express those thoughts due to a stroke that has placed him into the care of Deborah full-time.
Deborah struggles to run (and really, fails is more the right term) a B&B. She manages to make it into town on Wednesdays - the highlight of that visit being the time she spends in emails to her only son, Adam. She dotes on her son and lives for his birthday when they can take a picnic out on the moor. However, the last picnic was held in 2004 - a disastrous event that has resulted in Adam's refusal to make it home. Still, Deborah hopes and hopes.
Our Picnics in the Sun may sound like a title that could be about something happy - my mind brought up images of laughing children and games played after sandwiches and lemonade were consumed. But Joss has written a book that highlights regret. The regret of decisions made in the past, of relationships not maintained, of lives not lived.