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Our Endless Numbered Days cover art

Our Endless Numbered Days

By: Claire Fuller
Narrated by: Eilidh L. Beaton
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Summary

Winner of the 2015 Desmond Elliott Prize

1976: Peggy Hillcoat is eight. She spends her summer camping with her father, playing her beloved record of The Railway Children, and listening to her mother's grand piano, but her pretty life is about to change.

Her survivalist father, who has been stockpiling provisions for the end, which is surely coming soon, takes her from London to a cabin in a remote European forest. There he tells Peggy the rest of the world has disappeared.

Her life is reduced to a piano that makes music but no sound and a forest where all that grows is a means of survival. And a tiny wooden hut that is everything.

©2015 Claire Fuller (P)2015 Audible, Ltd

Critic reviews

"Like all good fairy tales, this is a book filled with suspense and revelation, light and shadow and the overwhelming feeling that nothing is quite as it seems in the Hillcoats’ lives. It’s spellbinding, scary stuff." ( The Daily Express)
"Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue." ( The Times)

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The rest of the world has gone.

Children are the first victims, when their parents go to war and the abuse is always inflicted with love and merciless brutality. This book depicts a particularly cruel and savage war, where a child is taken hostage into the apocalyptic fantasies of her father, and is made to disappear into the wild, into her imagination and her deepest survival instincts.
We meet Peggy, aged 17, in London with her mother, and a younger brother she never knew, till her return from the forest; where her father kept her for nine years. She remembers and tells the story from her point of view, she is an innocent, imaginative little girl, that loves her mama and her papa like all children, and wants to believe in their love. She tells us of her survival in a forest where her father has made her believe is the last place on earth and they are the only survivors.
Beautifully written, well described reality of living outside of society, with minimum resources and no other human contact. We see the awakening of a child into autonomy under the most twisted of circumstances, breaking free into her world and the world.

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43 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Intriguing, thought-provoking, with a good twist.

Any additional comments?

I chose this book because it has won prizes and has been praised by many critics and book bloggers I respect. It is not the kind of novel that I would normally pick up in a library or bookshop but I'm very glad that I gave it a go.

The story concerns Peggy who is taken from her home in London, under mysterious circumstances, to live in a cabin the woods ( in Germany? ) by her Survivalist father. She is eight years old at the time of her 'abduction'. One night, while her concert pianist mother is away on a concert tour, she overhears snatches of a quarrel between her father and his long-term friend and fellow survivalist Oliver. Their departure from the family home follows almost immediately after this. When Peggy escapes from the cabin and her father and is reunited with her mother, she is seventeen and discovers that she has an eight-year-old brother whom she has never known.

The bulk of the tale tells of the endless numbered days in the cabin with her father, surviving in the natural world with no modern conveniences and believing a story , told by her father, of a natural catastrophe which has left only the two of them alive. The relationship between the two of them undergoes many stresses and changes and when Peggy discovers the possibility of another person living nearby she begins to challenge the version of life her father has constructed for her. Puberty begins to rear its head too and Peggy is further confused. A descent into mental illness (for one or both of them)seems inevitable and a crisis arises between father and daughter, leading to tragedy and a dramatic final denouement.The story starts quite slowly but builds to a very dramatic end, with a twist which left me open-mouthed. I had thought I had worked out where the story was going but there was a sting in the tale that I did not see coming.

The narrative reads like a modern fairy tale in some respects and the narrator did well to keep me hooked to a storyline which for some periods was a bit light on plot. But overall, I would recommend it to anyone who likes a good yarn and an unexpected ending.

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31 people found this helpful

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An extraordinary and gripping listen

This book kept me wondering until the very end: why did they leave the civilised world and go to the forest? What makes a man take his daughter out of her young life to live far away from any human being in the middle of nowhere? And how can a young girl like Peggy cope with a situation like this? And at the very end of the book when the whole secret was revealed I was even more taken aback...
I must say that this is one of the best books I've ever listened to. It's gripping, it's unexpected, it's unputdownable. Excellent work and highly recommended!

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19 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Great!

Let's say ... The Revenant meets Room meets Girl on The Train... a gripping listen, very well narrated.

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13 people found this helpful

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Kept me gripped by the unfolding story throughout.

It was a slow start but gradually unfolded into a gripping tale of a child's life dominated by her survivalist Father's obsession, and self centred revenge against her mother. Although I could tell the awful truth before the reveal, I felt that it was handled with sensitivity and a skill in story telling that lacked gratuitous sensationalism. It was also full of brilliant details of the struggle to survive off grid. I now feel I don't know what to listen to that can follow that!

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13 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars

Eerie

If you could sum up Our Endless Numbered Days in three words, what would they be?

Resourceful, crafty, absorbing.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Peggy/Punzel, because we see everything through her eyes, and though there are clues which make it somewhat easy to guess the awful between-the-lines truths she's not directly telling us, still we want to hear it from her side, and will her to fight on. Because she is an infant for most of the story, you forgive her naivety - but can't help wanting to slip into the pages and tell her to run away!!

What three words best describe Eilidh L. Beaton’s voice?

Soft, feminine, commanding.

If you made a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

This Be the Verse!

Any additional comments?

Reminded me a lot of the Life of Pi, as the protagonist goes through a remarkable and unbelievable experience, one with very little chance of surviving, but does survive the most harrowing of dangers, with only their wits and imagination to guide them. The first person perspective makes for a deeply absorbing read (along with the past/present disjointed timeline, feeding you clue-crumbs to make you even hungrier for the big answers), and the reader can't help but imagine how they would cope in Peggy's place. Despite the grim subject matter, having a sympathetic central character gives the book a strong emotional core, and it's worth sticking with (but I agree that it perhaps ends too abruptly...).

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11 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Great story, let down by the telling

This is the first Audible book that I thought I'd be better off reading myself!

The story was really really appealing, I love the survivalist themes, the detail and the characters. But felt from the start that the narration was really overdone!

The narrator had a good crack at the accents, not an easy thing to do but also really distracting. The main characters voice was really over-egged IMO, irritated me and capped any empathy/sympathy I felt to the character, which had the knock-on effect on my enjoyment in the story. Shame as its a great dramatic tale!

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Excellent read

Absorbing and beautifully written.
Simple but thought provoking tale with just enough clues to provide answers if you concentrate on the smaller details.
Great narration.

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An enthrallingmix of reality and imagination!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?




In 1976 Peggy is 8 years old and living with her German mother, a celebrated pianist, and her Papa, James. But all is not happy families: James surrounds himself with an array of odd ‘retreater’ friends obsessed with ‘survivalism’, and when some marital crisis which Peggy doesn’t understand makes her mother go away for a short while, James takes his little girl off for a ‘holiday’. Not a donkey -rides -and-sandcastles holiday, but what becomes 9 years in dense forest somewhere in a mountainous part of Europe, in Die Hűtte a cramped cabin James had been led to believe contained all that was needed for a retreat from humanity – but in fact is a wreck.

It’s a tense story cleverly structured through flash-backs and flash-forwards, so that we know from the start that Peggy survives the experience, but gut-tightening suspense keeps us completely engrossed in the intervening years. The minutiae of surviving in the forest, with fire-lighting, skinning squirrels and boiling acorns and leaves, make their life completely real. But the positive mood takes its first downward spiral when winter and hunger close in and James tells his little girl that the rest of the world has been destroyed in an apocalyptic storm leaving only the two of them left alive. Peggy believes Papa unreservedly.

The undercurrent of menace increases over time as James’ mental state deteriorates. There are rages, and when Peggy ceases to be just a little girl, he starts to call her by the name of his wife who he believes betrayed him. By the time Peggy is 17, she is saved by discovering Reuben, the wild man of the woods from whom she learns that her father has lied – and what love is. He forces Peggy to escape from her now demented father, to cross ‘the divide’ from where she finally returns to her mother and a brother she’d never known. The revelation of Reuben’s identity is the final masterly twist which lingered with me long after I’d finished listening.

The narrator Eilidh L Benson hugely increases the effect of the narrative through her creation of a child’s voice. She avoids the trap of being coy or irritating, but sounds young enough to increase our unease by a constant reminder that the story is told through the child’s eye, a child who emerges into some kind of damaged adulthood only at the very end.

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10 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Original

Fascinating idea. Hauntingly possible.
Beautifully narrated. Recommended to the romantic in us. Seen through the eyes of a sweet natured young girl innocently believing in the reality of her fathers vision.

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