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ISBN : B00HF3W33W
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For 30 years, Howard and Deborah Morgan have poured all their energy and modest savings into Stoneyridge, a smallholding deep in the English moors. Howard putters with pottery, Deborah dabbles in weaving, and both struggle to tend sheep and chickens and live off the land. But what began with simple dreams of solitude and sunlit picnics in the hills has given way to a harsher reality. To help with finances, they decide to turn Stoneyridge into a bed-and-breakfast. But a sudden stroke leaves Howard incapacitated and Deborah overwhelmed. Then, late one evening, two men arrive needing a room for the night - and set off a chain of events that uncovers the relics of old tragedies. And through it all, Stoneyridge quietly hides the bitter and transformative truth.
Direct download links available for Epub Our Picnics in the Sun
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 10 hours and 32 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
- Audible.com Release Date: December 19, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HF3W33W
Epub Our Picnics in the Sun
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.