What a beautiful and heartbreaking story, with the most important of ingredients: hope! The Booker Prrize nominees are always worth a read, and Sian Hughes book is no exception. The unique way she captures looking back at ones childhood as an adult gripped me to my very core. 100% recommended!

A beautiful story that was also heartbreaking! Full of secrets and reveals with high and lows. The story of a life from beginning to end written wonderfully

An interesting book where you could feel the narrator's inner turmoil and struggle navigating every day life.

The sadness. The voice of the narrator, The heavy subject matter. These are all reasons I liked but did not love this book. I found it a bit slow to listen to and tough to get into but it got better as it plotted along. I would only recommend this title to someone who likes to be sad.
Thank you to the author and Netgalley for the audio ARC which I was provided in exchange for my honest review.

The meat of this story is fantastic, and is an emotional trip through loss, family, and one's life story. However, the pacing is a little all over the place for what I typically enjoy in books like this. Perhaps having the audiobook version is partially to blame for my opinion as the narrator's voice/style pulled me out of the story quite a bit. It's a great read, just not particularly for me.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advance copy of the audiobook in exchange for my honest review.

This was a quick read and really transported me to the location. I haven't read anything like this before and it has really stayed with me since.

Picked up this book for the Booker Prize 2023 longlist and but sadly I don't think it was my kind of book.

This novel felt unmoored because it follows a woman who is unmoored herself, struggling to adjust to adulthood with her only examples having failed to give her a direction. She becomes obsessed with the disappearance (departure?) of her mother and seems to get lost in remembering her childhood. A confusing book that I could not connect with.

Rounding up to 3 stars.

This want exactly up my alley. I found it to be quite slow but can see why others really enjoyed it. Some real heavy themes in this book that kind of just got glossed over. Thank you for the opportunity to listen

Good listen and enjoyable novel but not quite up my alley. Found the pace strange, often times too slow and often too fast - glazing over some heavy themes. Good take on grief, loss, discovery and family dynamics but think it could've made more of an impact with less editing. Not my thing but understand why it's become beloved. Thank you for this listening copy.

Whilst I enjoyed the audio of Pearl I didn’t love it. It was a life story following themes of loss, grief, coming of age, mental health, family and discovery. I struggled a little at times finding it a bit slow. I can see how it is highly rated by some, but just not really my thing. Many thanks for the listening copy.

'I have a pretty sensitive trip switch [...]. It can flip over from reality to invention in a heartbeat.'

When, as a reviewer, you’re looking for resonating lines or passages to pull out as quotes that will illustrate style or technique or flair, 'Pearl' would offer you up every other page, it's that exquisite:

'While I lay on my stomach and invented ghosts and demons and evil spirits, rising from the cellar [...], Emily ran her fingers over my shoulder blades and kissed the small of my back. She said she had read that the nerve endings on the back were so far apart that I wouldn't know if she'd touched me with one, two, or three fingers. I didn't care how many fingers she was pressing into my back. I only wanted to keep them there.'

Every phrase overbrims with rich tone, life, and Marianne's ages, the phases of her life, are realised with a sensual appreciation of smell, warmth, colour, symbolism. Small instances become totemised, precious, and I found myself caring overly for the little moments in ‘Pearl’, the trinkets of feeling:

'I was suddenly aware of the precise distance between us. Not only the distance between his voice and mine, a space of live air I could measure with my breath, but the distance between our bodies, our legs, all the way to the space between his feet and mine.'

Marianne feels life at the edges of where it has soaked in; her character's first-person perspective describes her life from the liminal places where what she knows touches up against the life unknown, which forms the broader canvas.

'Pearl' is very much about vision. Hughes offers up the most glorious vignettes of, for instance, Marianne reading Charlotte's Web on the window seat with the Chinese Willow-pattern cushion covers, her hands distracted from picking her chicken pox scabs. Reading ‘Pearl’, I am in Marianne's body, sensing the immediacy of life as it is lived, as it touches her. I see and feel AJ rubbing almond oil into the forearms of the girl whose turn it is to sit beside him, after he has rubbed it into his own new tattoo; I see and feel Marianne's jumper sagging with the weight of the puppy she carries home in it, the wool of it soaked with his wee, and her belly flesh already itching with flea bites.

Touch and colour, warmth and smell or taste, comprise the palette of this novel: '[...] every kind of recycled container was sprouting something you could eat or which smelled good. One whole side of the garage was dotted with giant yoghurt pots painted in bright stripes and geraniums growing out of them. Beneath them a row of tomatoes was growing in assorted sinks, crates, and a toilet bowl. The smell along the wall of warm geranium and tomato leaves was dense and oily and familiar.'

And chasing the heels of these vibrant sensations come the quicksilver thoughts to which they give rise. Hughes twines Marianne's sensations with her emotional responses and cogitation so tightly in every instance that 'Pearl' stuns its reader with the brightness of the world of the novel and with just how much there is of it!

Hughes deftly draws a direct line from Marianne the child to Marianne the adult, as a character who is desperate to be living, yet terrified of the consequences of doing so. As a paradigm of this, Hughes conjures the episode where Marianne is trying to manage the gaping buttonholes where the handmade buttons down the front of her second-hand dress keep falling out as she follows behind her too-fast collegemate, bursting with the anxiety of carrying a chocolate cheesecake whilst wearing a white dress. Hughes translates the tangible physical into the emotional with integrity and is able to pull and push back and forth along this seam, all the way through the novel.

Things happen to Marianne and she experiences them as bright friezes, Hughes capturing for her reader the depth of the colour staining the picture:

'At primary school there was a lot of talk about the baby stuff when we hung upside down by our knees from the climbing bars with our skirts falling over our faces, we liked to stay hanging there so long we could make farting noises with our vaginas. We hung there with our school skirts falling over our heads, letting air in and pushing it out, and talking about what fingers we could put in the hole. At some point one of the other girls must have told me that was the hole where the baby came out. I rejected the idea [...] I knew we were talking about something the size of a melon. There was no way that was coming out of there. A girl called Carole claimed she put two fingers in together when she was in the bath, but everyone else agreed it was the right size for one.'

The seminal scene where Marianne, postpartum, delirious, leaking breast milk down herself, hallucinating cats, is a masterpiece of technique; it could stand in for the entire novel, like one of those children's books where the back cover says 'want to try? Read p. 27 for a sample', and p. 27 somehow encapsulates everything that a reader will experience from that novel. This crucial scene is exactly that:

'Everything in the room started to leak colour: his face, his dark brown hair, his soft striped shirt, his black jeans and his woollen socks with red and orange toes, started to bleach and buckle and the redness leaked into a pool around our feet. I could smell the colour - its blood and cat fur and old coats in damp cupboards. […] If I concentrated very hard on them, I could see through the cats. Not totally, but the cats faded out. I began to think the cats were some kind of test, that maybe they weren't real cats. I knew you cannot see through real cats, not even sometimes. […] [It] occurred to me that [the cats] must have eaten up all the red ink that was on the floor. I became quite interested in the floor. I looked under the sofa to see if the ink had gone under there.'

I just can't convey how sublime a reading experience 'Pearl' is. It's one of those novels where you want to pause and look into the distance every few phrases just to savour the poetic tensile strength of a line, the sensation as one of Hughes's images resolves itself upon your mind, to savour the felt sense of her craftswomanship.

And this is complemented by Laura Brydon's vocal performance, which is pitch perfect. Her musical score of pauses, rising volume, the drawing-out of words and the way she imbues a phrase with a giggle or a throat-clearing to convey character mood and emotion. It's not a case of (which is often the way) the narrator not-getting-in-the-way-of the novel, avoiding interfering with the conveyance of the text to the reader, but the audio recording of 'Pearl' becomes more than the sum of its parts. Hughes's novel and Brydon's narration together make the most captivating listening experience.

My sincere thanks to W. F. Howes Ltd for the chance to review a digital copy of the audiobook.

Beatifully written story which takes us on a journey through Marianne having lost her mother at eight years old, through to becoming a mother herself. And the consequences of having an absent mother and the effects grief can have on who we become. All told through Marianne's interesting voice and take on life. Recommended.

The narrator of an audiobook can often make or break a book, depending on whether you connect with their delivery. Pearl is narrated by Laura Brydon and I absolutely loved listening to her read, her narration definitely added to my reading experience.

Marianne is only eight years old at the start of the story and an adult and mother by the end. Laura Brydon was able to capture the childlike qualities of the story in the opening chapters and adapts her delivery as the story progresses to signify Marianne’s growing years.

The story focuses around a medieval poem called Pearl, Marianne believes that the poem is the the key to working out what happened to her mother. As Marianne processes her memories of her mother she recalls rhymes and folklore and each chapter begins with a rhyme. This gives the writing a lyrical quality which was accentuated in this audio version.

This is a beautiful story of grief, loss and memory, with snatches of humour that prevent the story from being too melancholic. I adored listening to Marianne’s story and being witness to her contemplations on the mystery that surrounded her mother’s disappearance to her eventual acceptance.

Pearl is a sweet, soft, and subtly beautiful musing on grief and an offbeat childhood. But one that I didn’t connect with in any emotional way. I hadn’t realised that this book was almost entirely narrated by the child in the synopsis. I almost always dislike those books. Pearl was lovely enough to look past that, and a book that I will heartily recommend to customers.

The audio was really good and the barely did an I excellent job of imbuing a real sense of childhood whimsy into her voice.

An exciting read with amazing plot that keep you guessing till the end! Thank you NetGalley and Bookouture for this ARC!

A truly emotional story of loss, dealing with grief and the tricks ones mind plays on you during and after such stressful events. What is an actual childhood memory? And what is simply a creation of one's imagination from what others have said or even a mixture of several events rolled into one?

Marianne is 8 when her mother disappears and we follow her through the next few decades of her life as she tries to understand what has happened and why. We experience the impact this has on her life, her relationships and her health as she tries to find a way to cope. Written in the first person I felt connected with Marianne and on several occasions could feel tears welling up with the raw emotions of this loss. I listened to the audiobook which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt choked up as we headed to the conclusion of this story.

Hughes has a lyrical way with her language which delivers a punch with some meaningful insights into grief, loss and their psychological impact. With Pearl, Hughes has managed to create a story which though we have some more bizarre and unique characters enter and leave Marianne's life they never detracted me from the core emotions and thoughts of our protagonist.


I received an ARC copy of the audiobook through NetGalley

I will be putting up a dedicated review video on my Bask in the Story Youtube channel but this will not be published until 2nd October

After initially taking against the narrator, I soon warmed to her voice. I found the nursery rhyme chapter openings really irritating and I think that’s what put me off the narration. Once I got over that, I came to really love this book with its exploration of grief, loss, abandonment and memory. Siân Hughes’ starting point, the mediaeval poem Pearl, was not known to me but the reader gets a sense of it from the stories woven into the narrative. She writes beautifully about nature and the struggles of growing up.

I really liked the narration of this but the story did nothing for me.
I didn't connect and felt like the short story had too much of a tempo and yet not enough story.
I mean, I really wanted to feel for this but since our main character grows so fast but yet thinks of her mom the whole time I also found it hard to follow. This is probably a good book for others, but for me, knowing that this is on the longlist of the Booker, it wasn't enough and I don't understand why it's on the list.

Thank you to the publishers, author and NetGalley for the free copy of this audio book.

This book definitely makes you feel things! I didn't totally connect with the main character but enjoyed it nonetheless. The narrator was good.

I downloaded the audioARC of this novel from NetGalley with some trepidation. The Middle English poem Pearl has a special place in my heart, and I only have two reactions to modern responses to it - I either love them or loathe them, sometimes quite unfairly as my reaction is coming from my own (over-)attachment.

Fortunately, Siân Hughes's Pearl is easy to like. Opening with the narrator, Marianne, returning home for a festival in her hometown that celebrates the dearly departed, soon we hear that the person Marianne has lost has no grave to dress. Her mother disappeared when she was only eight years old, and the impact of this strange bereavement and, indeed, the strange behaviour of her mother prior to her disappearance, form the lyrical reflections Marianne shares with us.

An element of mystery hangs over the novel. For a long time we are not sure whether Marianne's mother left, committed suicide, or was swept away in an accident. This early section of the narrative is discomfiting and we don't know how much we can trust Marianne. Is she unreliable? Is she sane? Is she quite of this world at all?

This experience follows Marianne's own. She doesn't know how far she can trust her own memories, her father's, the people of the town. Gradually, Marianne solves her mysteries to her own satisfaction. She spends her life from 8-years-old onwards contemplating Pearl, believing it holds the solution. Ultimately, though, the discovery of a small treasure makes Marianne realise that while Pearl was meaningful to her mother as a woman who had lost a child, it is Gawain and the Green Knight the same manuscript that holds the breadcrumb trail to her fate.

In short, this is a novel that is concerned almost entirely with the internal life of its narrator. As such, it won't appeal to everyone, but it is no wonder that those of us who like it *really* like it.

Three Word Review: Grief begets grief.