No Such Thing as Monday
A Novel
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
No Such Thing as Monday
Pre-order Now for £16.29
-
Narrated by:
-
By:
-
Siân Hughes
About this listen
From a Booker Prize-longlisted author, a novel in which a woman tries to overcome her abusive past and find her estranged sister in a deeply moving and darkly funny quest for redemption
Foul-mouthed, scrappy, and self-destructive, Steffie is her own worst enemy. Sustained by her sardonic sense of humor, she spends her days working at a dry cleaner’s and tending to her ailing, impoverished, abusive father. She was always his favorite, a fact that leaves her wracked with guilt; her sister Caroline, who bore the brunt of his rage, fled when they were both teenagers.
When her father dies, Steffie sets out to find Caroline, seeking love and forgiveness in a world which has too often denied her both. Along the way, she must confront her own memories, and the choices that have brought her to this point.
Written in the working-class British realist tradition of Douglas Stuart and Andrea Arnold, No Such Thing as Monday cements Hughes’ reputation as an exceptional and compassionate chronicler of precarious and chaotic lives.
Critic reviews
Praise for No Such Thing as Monday
“A stunningly frank and darkly funny novel of loneliness and resilience. I loved it.”
—Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry
“I was blindsided by the brilliance of this novel.”
—Meg Mason, author of Sorrow and Bliss and Sophie, Standing There
“Richly absorbing and powerful—a ‘read to the small hours,’ novel. Steffie has a unique voice that keeps you glued to her story, and that I absolutely loved.”
—Kate Hamer, author of The Girl in the Red Coat
“Delicious, and it hit my heart like a hammer blow.”
—Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Praise for Pearl
“An exceptional debut novel….The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort—at once quiet and hugely ambitious—is very high. It’s a book that will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.”
—Booker Prize committee
“A masterful novel, shot through with legend and song. It can be read on many levels: as a mystery, as a story of grief and healing, as a response to a poem. But most of all, it can be read as a story of love.”
—The Boston Globe
“Compulsive and wonderfully written, Pearl is a small gem.”
—The Times Literary Supplement
“Hughes’s novel, which is wonderful on the detail of a late 20th-century rural English childhood and at its best recalls Edna O’Brien’s masterful A Pagan Place, is radical in largely dispensing with dramatic tension in order to create a circling story that maps the lasting impact of a loss.….The way trauma cuts one off from the world and isolates the sufferer in the moment that hurt them is brilliantly rendered here.”
—The Guardian
“Pearl is a novel that has wisdom and experience distilled into it, that defies its downbeat subject matter with the joy of its telling.”
—The Times (London)
“[A] stunning debut.”
—Sunday Post
“A quietly beautiful novel, full of grief and English poetry...A rare gem that fully deserves its Booker longlisting, and your attention.”
—The Telegraph