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Our Endless Numbered Days
- Narrated by: Eilidh L. Beaton
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
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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.
Critic reviews
"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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What listeners say about Our Endless Numbered Days
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- bookylady
- 28-03-16
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.
29 people found this helpful
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- Wras
- 23-04-15
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.
42 people found this helpful
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- Miss H L Jones
- 26-01-17
Great
I don't think this is the type of novel I would usually go for so was surprised how much I enjoyed it. A sad story but interesting and unique and found I was never bored with it at any time.
6 people found this helpful
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- Claire
- 10-01-17
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...).
11 people found this helpful
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- David Cotton
- 17-05-15
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.
11 people found this helpful
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- Martin
- 22-05-15
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!
19 people found this helpful
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- emma
- 04-03-16
Great!
Let's say ... The Revenant meets Room meets Girl on The Train... a gripping listen, very well narrated.
13 people found this helpful
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- franjangle
- 14-06-15
Extraordinarily gripping unfolding tale of deception & survival
I knocked off one star for the slightly off-putting male voices adopted by the reader, otherwise excellently told. The outcome brilliant, half suspected but only towards the end and even then.. a shock. Descriptions through the eyes of a growing learning struggling child: of nature both beautiful and terrifying and encounters tough and tender..
8 people found this helpful
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- ruth
- 05-06-15
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.
8 people found this helpful
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- Stephanie Kerney
- 16-09-15
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!
12 people found this helpful
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- RueRue
- 18-07-15
Disturbing and compelling
A disturbing story of a child victimized by the actions of her selfish, unfit parents. It is quite compelling, but also difficult to read due to the subject. Experienced readers will figure out the final revelation(s) way before the end, but this is still a compelling story, well narrated.
7 people found this helpful
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- Bonny
- 05-05-15
Repetitive, disturbing, and melodramatic
When I finish a book like Our Endless Numbered Days, I wonder what I missed that caused me to only give two stars to a book that has a much higher overall rating, and that so many readers seem to love. The best explanation I could come up with is that there was some sort of terrible electronic glitch at Audible where other readers got the well-written, brilliant, incredible version of this book, and I got the repetitive, disturbing, maddening, just plain awful version, because we clearly read different books.
If you're in the mood for an overly long, repetitive book, full of irresponsible, selfish, and completely crazy adults, a questionable protagonist, written by an author that withheld information from the reader until the end of the sordid tale to make the ending more melodramatic, then you might enjoy Our Endless Numbered Days. Even a decent narration and some above average prose couldn't save this one for me.
9 people found this helpful
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- Chelsea Slade
- 03-10-17
Amazing narrator for a hauntingly amazing book
I hate this book, but it's amazing. I hate it because of how sad it is, but it's so well written that if anyone asks me for a book recommendation, I will reluctantly tell them that this is one of the best I've ever read/listened too:
2 people found this helpful
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- Annette
- 11-01-17
Beautiful writing, but uncomfortable with the treatment of disturbing subject matter
I knew nothing about this book when I picked it up.
I feel I should start off by saying that the 3 stars for writing in this review, rather than 4 or 5, are more related to story content than anything else.
Fuller's writing is spare and beautiful, and the structure of her novel intersects deftly with the psychology of her main character, the voice of the story. I think Fuller has a gorgeous skill with language and is a great storyteller.
(spoiler)However, I didn't appreciate how the violence & rape perpetrated on the young girl at the center of the story was treated. The story is disturbing and these events definitely fall in the context of a dark mystery, but it feels like they are being employed as devices, or in other words, for the purpose of entertainment.
I'm missing empathy, insight, compassion from the author outside of the voice of the narrator/main character in the telling of this story.
The voice actor for this audible version was great.
4 people found this helpful
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- Ronald
- 01-05-15
Poor Choice
I couldn't wait to get to the dismal ending of this one. The narration is in the voice of a little/young girl and it became very tedious. Many parts drag on and on to no benefit of the storyline. In one section the characters go kiting and eventually it flies off and away, like this book should do.
6 people found this helpful
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- Linda
- 03-06-15
Insanity in the forest.....
Beautiful story that becomes a lesson in survival in the end. I loved this listen, the writing was perfect for an audiobook, very descriptive and picturesque. The narration was beautiful. The narrator is very good at individualizing the characters and has a beautiful English accent. This story is one of those I wanted to listen to again after learning the conclusion. This story is not a happy one but a lesson of one little girl's survival both mentally and physically and whether she was successful can be debated.
4 people found this helpful
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- Misha
- 09-12-21
What happened here?
My friend told me he was going to read this book and I assumed it would be literary gold because he has great taste. I was very wrong. I made my way through most of it (more than halfway) before realizing that it was going nowhere and then finished it because I didn't have anything else lined up.
Here's the thing. I didn't find this book isn't haunting or compelling. It's boring. You get a day by day, but not even anything exciting or particularly interesting - just a dredge. The review that said that it was repetitive hit the point well. It's repetitive until the novel skips ahead several years and then suddenly it ends.
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Overall
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- Sharon Ringer
- 01-08-21
Amazing plot, so touching
Once again Claire Fuller is weaving a heart touching story, the characters are so real. A beautiful story, kept me wanting to hear it. I warmly recommend.