A Year of Marvellous Ways: The Richard and Judy Bestseller

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A YEAR OF MARVELLOUS WAYS is the unforgettable and completely captivating new novel from Sarah Winman, author of the international bestseller WHEN GOD WAS A RABBIT and a Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller. When timid Jersey crab Armen (Michael Cera) meets bold tourist sea crab Ramona (Keke Palmer), it causes shell-shocking tension in the community. Ned the fisherman is 'Cornish through and through' and woos, not with flowers, but bunches of whiting and oysters with 'the coolness, the saltiness of a prince's kiss'.

What is so appealing about A Year of Marvellous Ways in that in its pursuit of magical joy and hope, again expressed in ways so lyrical your heart will dance as you read, it doesn’t pretend that everything will be all right as some kind of foregone conclusion. has come home from the war and looks up the girl he left behind with results that are beyond his nightmares but will feature in them. After getting used to the style ( no "talking" marks anywhere in the book - which totally annoyed me) I wanted to see where everything tied in.It's a wonderful story of how human lives intersect and interweave, and how even the cruellest hurts can be healed through patience, compassion and love. But whereas then she didn’t linger for too long on these more fanciful aspects, she revels in them here in her second novel, and the entire narrative takes on the aspect of a fairytale, complete with a journey into the woods; characters with strange, winsome names and enchanted pasts (Marvellous tells the story of her mermaid mother, shot shortly after her daughter’s birth, mistaken for a seal frolicking in the water); and a gentle kind of magic is available to those in need: a young girl drops an egg white into a glass of water to see it take the form of the face of her one true love.

I listened to the audio book, and as always Sarah Winman's narration is superb, but for some reason I struggled focusing on the story. A Year of Marvellous Ways opens with an old woman, Marvellous Ways, waking up realizing that what she has been waiting for, what she has been told to wait for, will be coming to her soon. An array of entrancing stories from them both are littered throughout, but they are perfectly knitted together – during the course of which dreams are shattered, realities made and magic happens. Much of the joy in A Year of Marvellous Ways is the mystery at the heart of the novel, the way the story unfolds in unanticipated ways, developments that are simultaneously surprising and inevitable.

Coming back to my question about whether you enjoy the journey, or if it just to get to the destination: this book is a journey, a non-linear one, and one that is told in a particular style. And I remember it that my agent at the time, he’d read it and he said: “Something has to happen after this postcard”. As Britain closed itself off to Europe, Winman wrote a story about characters whose lives and minds opened up after visiting the continent.

Drake için farklı bir şey beklemiştim sonunda ama tabii ki sürprizlerle dolu bu kitapta tahminlerin tutması pek olası değildi. From the cover, this isn’t the kind of book I’d normally pick up because the title and artwork make it seem frivolous. But the love between characters in this book strives to remind me of the beauty of life and living and how sometimes the ultimate test of love is loving someone enough to let them go. This is a touching, beautiful book that I know I'll treasure and re-read every time I'm in need of reminding of that. I have to admit though, that there were times that the plot was stronger and times where I felt like I was wading through a lot of the story, but I don’t think its possible for me to rate a book by Sarah Winman anything less than 5 stars.And also the opener, once I’d located that – that this came to her on a dream, this need to wait from a dead lover, that gave great scope to how everything happened to be linked. Because stories have to go forward, generally, and so I’m writing a story that needs to be propelled to a certain point, so that’s kind of a forward issue. She doesn't worry what the neighbours think and sometimes her actions were shocking although I think that was part of being herself rather than setting out to be shocking. Sonrasındaysa hem birlikte geçen zamanlarını hem de geçmişlerini okuyoruz ve Marvellous ile Drake arasındaki bağı adım adım çözmeye çalışıyoruz.