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My Phantoms

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My Phantoms

By: Gwendoline Riley
Narrated by: Helen McAlpine
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Helen Grant is a mystery to her daughter. An extrovert with few friends who has sought intimacy in the wrong places; a twice-divorced mother-of-two now living alone surrounded by her memories, Helen (known to her acquaintances as 'Hen') has always haunted Bridget.

Now, Bridget is an academic in her forties. She sees Helen once a year, and considers the problem to be contained. As she looks back on their tumultuous relationship - the performances and small deceptions - she tries to reckon with the cruelties inflicted on both sides. But when Helen makes it clear that she wants more, it seems an old struggle will have to be replayed.

From the prize-winning author of First Love, My Phantoms is a bold, heart-stopping portrayal of a failed familial bond, which brings humour, subtlety and new life to the difficult terrain of mothers and daughters.

©2021 Gwendoline Riley (P)2021 Gwendoline Riley Contemporary Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Haunted Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt
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searingly honest writing with a narrator of incredible skill, I was transported into the story in a way so few seem to manage on here.

best reading I've heard yet

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This is a short book and at first seems quite straightforward but is actually really sophisticated. The story is narrated by a woman mainly about her dysfunctional realtionship with her mother but it's really clever as it exposes a lot about the narrator herself which isn't expressed explicitly. Brilliant writing. The narration was spot on too. I very rarely listen to books more than once but I will definitely listen to this again.

Brilliant in its apparent simplicity

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misunderstanding and sometimes outright dislike. I'm not sure whether I'm glad I listened or whether I'd rather not have heard any of the bitterness. Maybe it's too clever for me but I can't say I enjoyed it

what a bitter story

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Best avoid if feeling depressed.
This is not a feel good book.
It is a brilliant description of 'challenging' personalities, family relationships and how fairy tale endings are fairy tales.

The desire to see one's mother happy, or at least content, resonates.

There is love here, I think, for no matter how brittle the relationships between the mother and her daughters they did not quite break.

The father not so much...

Brilliant but

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A short but powerful depiction of a woman's fraught relationship with her mother. Much of it makes for difficult listening, as both mother and daughter wrangle with largely unexpressed feelings and tensions, frequently attempting to outmanoeuvre one another. The narrator's lower-middle class English upbringing with attendant affectations and misplaced snobberies will be a little too close to home for some of us. As Bridget embarks upon PhD studies and then becomes an academic, the tensions between the lower-middle class and the professional middle class (in the UK) are laid bare, producing chasms between the central characters which are both trivial and enormous.
I was some way into the novel before I realised that the story reveals at least as much about Bridget as it does about her mother. This is brilliant writing, and wonderfully narrated.

Brilliant and unsettling

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