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Night Waking

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Night Waking

By: Sarah Moss
Narrated by: Jane Lambert
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About this listen

Historian Anna Bennett has a book to write. She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins.

Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders.

The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story.

©2011 Sarah Moss (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction

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It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time - a sharply observed story of an academic who is also rearing 2 kids in a hostile environment (both geographically and in the setting of her marriage). I liked it so much I treated myself to an audible recording to listen to during my runs. But inexplicably, the audible recording concludes the book at the end of chapter 15, thereby missing out an entire chapter that helps to resolve a number of threads. Where is chapter 16?

Fantastic book, but where is chapter 16?

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This outstanding, brilliant book has 16 chapters, but Audible only bothered to publish the first 15 of them. An appalling disservice to this author, and further evidence that Amazon/Audible doesn’t care about writers, or books, or readers.

Audible has forgotten the final chapter

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The narration was one of the better aspects of this book for me and I ploughed on expecting something to happen and the plot and purpose of the book to reveal itself. Now having completed it I am left wondering if I missed a chunk. The whole novel is set around the unhappy, dissatisfied life of Anna, who spends practically every night walking the floor with her youngest child Timothy who for some reason they call 'Moth' I think. Her days are spent refereeing various altercations between her two sons, the elder of which, Raphael, is a super intelligent environmentally green fanatic with a death obsession and the tantrum prone Timothy.

Throughout all this is the bubbling resentment of her puffin counting husband, Giles, who spends blissful days counting said birds on the remote and virtually uninhibited island on which they live.

Interspersed with all this is the reading of letters from an unknown source and the finding of some baby's bones wrapped in a knitted shawl buried in the garden of their house. There are no spoilers here so I shan't go further. I know some people enjoyed this book and there are moments of humour when Anna imagines what torture she would like to mete out to Giles on occasion and indeed the children. The wonder for me is how she managed to restrain herself. Personally I felt all the characters, especially the children, lacked any redeeming features whatsoever.

I hate giving negative feedback and the book was well written and constructed but I am still left wondering what the point was.

Struggled to keep me awake

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Brilliant and at times hilarious observation of the challenges of binging up young children. Thought provoking on a range of topics. Well worth a read/listen. Regarding the narration I would have say this is just average, in particular the rendition of the elder child misses the mark, but this is not a deal breaker and shouldn’t put you off the book.

Funny and thought provoking

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I really enjoyed this book. To begin with I thought I might become too annoyed with the self sacrificing main character, but thankfully she resists many of the expections put upon her as a woman. The humour within the text helped make this an interesting exploration of the complexities of some women lives. The narration was good, and by the end I wanted more.

Very good read

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What would have made Night Waking better?

ditching the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. I found in the first chapter it was hard to know where the quote ended and the story began. started from the beginning twice.sticking to two themes instead of trying to encompass too much i.e., a mother trying to cope with two boys, the youngest sleeping for only a few hours in the night with her studying to write a book, or the finding of a baby's skeleton and its outcome or the letters by a woman from an unknown time period.

What will your next listen be?

ring of guilt by Judith cutler.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

didn't enjoy any of it..

What character would you cut from Night Waking?

all of them.

Any additional comments?

kept falling asleep.

too many diversions.

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Unfortunately I found the narration hard to listen to. I really wanted to like the book after reading reviews but it hadn’t grabbed me before the narration defeated me.

Narration

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