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This Shining Life

a powerful novel about treasuring life

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

For Rich, life is golden.
He fizzes with happiness and love.
But Rich has an incurable brain tumour.

After Rich dies, his wife Ruth can't see how to how to keep living, and their young son Ollie is intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens for a reason. Doesn't it?

Rich leaves behind a family without a father, a husband, a son and a best friend. And he also leaves behind a present for each of them. But while Ollie tries to understand the message within each present, Ruth finds herself adrift. The grief that is threatening to drown her has also unearthed long buried pain. Pain she has to face if she is to have any chance of moving on...

Harriet Kline weaves together the voices of a grieving family and paints an achingly beautiful picture of love in all its forms: absent, lost and, ultimately, regained.

© Harriet Kline 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 Dark Humour Family Life Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Women's Fiction Marriage

Critic reviews

A beautifully written and endlessly touching debut that's sure to tug your heartstrings.
An exquisitely beautiful and compelling novel about love, loss and life
Poignant but never maudlin, sweet but never saccharine, This Shining Life give us a heartbroken family, complicated and familiar in the best ways, going through the hardest of times but finding love and hope and, especially, one another.
Harriet Kline's This Shining Life captivated me because it's peopled with lovely and lovable characters who are all trying to solve the problem of grief. Ollie, at eleven-years old, sees this equation in the starkest terms, but his mother Ruth, Aunt Nessa, and grandparents are all struggling too, following the death of Ollie's dad, Rich. This beautiful book shows us that grief is not a problem to solve, but an expression of love, as we watch a family come together in the most heartwarming way.
A 'Summer best new reads': the bittersweet story of a family coming together in grief.
Loving, tender and occasionally funny ... a beautifully crafted piece of writing.
A poignant story
Deeply moving and empathetic ... very poignant and well-informed
Exquisitely written [with] terrific characterisation [that is] unforgettable
All stars
Most relevant
This first novel by Harriet Klein is an intelligently written and wonderfully crafted moving story about death, loss, love, family dynamics, emotional literacy, Neuro atypicality and how difficult it is to behave congruently with our feelings at times of ggrief. It focuses on seven characters who are variously the wife, son, mother-in-law, parents and friend/sister-in-law of Rich before and after his death, charting their journey. it explores the part that family Dynamics and stuckness played in everyone’s grieving processes. The story is drawn together around an 11-year-old boy with some form of neuro atypicality and his unwavering desire to solve the riddle of the meaning of life through the gifts his father had given out before his death.

The book is very well read.

Well crafted and poignant story

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