Our Endless Numbered Days
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Our Endless Numbered Days
Narrated by:
Eilidh L. Beaton
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Eilidh L. Beaton
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By:
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Claire Fuller
About this listen
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, LtdListeners also enjoyed...
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)
"Fuller handles the tension masterfully in this grown-up thriller of a fairytale, full of clues, questions and intrigue." ( The Times)
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.
Intriguing, thought-provoking, with a good twist.
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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.
An enthrallingmix of reality and imagination!
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However, as the book progressed the dog got longer walks whatever the weather. The story of Punzel and her father in their hut and their desperate quest for food was compelling, as was the unravelling of their minds as they faced their isolation. The story jumps from 'present day' to her life in Die Hutte, and I felt that her return to civilisation was dealt with realistically.
I particularly liked the way that Punzel matured during their years away, changing from a child to a young woman.
Terribly sad in parts, but ultimately uplifting - and, yes, I didn't see the ending coming!
Scarily realistic story of a father gone mad...
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Excellent, interesting read, great use of words
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Interesting and spooky!
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