Great for book club but brace for a hangover

Went through this very quickly! Couldn't start anything else for a while after as the mysterious side of this story, the unanswered questions had me going over and over the details for a week with what I've heard people call a 'book hangover'. It came highly recommended and I can see why.
Trying to imagine this life, how you would act and react in the same setting that no human has found themselves in before...it made for a great choice for our book club!

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Unsettling and haunting

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it was very different from what I normally read but was very engaging, despite the mundane nature of the narrators life.

The narration was excellent and really added to the story

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Thoroughly enjoyable

Deeply sad, nostalgic, hopeful and hopeless. A wonderful story told by an admirable protagonist. Left feeling full and empty all at once.

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A book that really counts

A truly beautiful book that leaves an indelible mark. The introduction outlines the whole story so you may want to skip it if you prefer but it's set out fairly early by the Child, our narrator what the outcome of the book will be. A group of women are trapped in an underground bunker, caged and unable to touch one another, watched only by three security guards. The child is both like and unlike the other women, never having known anything else. Living with little chance of any answers to their situation, an incident changes everything and there is a chance to discover more. What unfolds is a mesmerising work of speculative fiction that wrestles with our psyche as mortal beings, that explores purpose and mortality when answers are hard to come by. How do we hold each other in dignity even when there is little to hold on to. The Child seeks to understand but her journey is far from a straightforward one, as she counts her way through a strange world, step by step, she finds her own way to count in a place where there is no clear path for meaning.

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Strangely powerful

This book had an unsatisfactory ending (I was longing for an epilogue to answer all the questions) but despite this, it was very impactful. The sense of hopeless loneliness in the last quarter of the book was so palpable that I almost felt panicked by it. The narration was superb.

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Wow

I’m so glad I read this! It’s so thought provoking and moving. A must read.

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weirdly relatable and amazing

I first picked up the book in a airport in Bristol, I liked the cover and the blurb. I absolutely fell in love with this book! The story told through girlhood, love and human relationships and resilience is told from an innocent perspective. I was hoping the ending wouldn’t be what I predicted, it was and I ended up loving the book even more for it. Would highly recommend the book for women ❤️

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Intriguing

A sad and lonely story which describes the human condition from the perspective of a stranded and suddenly liberated group of women. But what is this freedom and what can they do with it?

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The best book I have ever read, bar none. Skip the introduction!

You must not read the introduction. it really should be an afterword. Skip it until you've finished. It's brilliantly written, but it is absolutely full of spoilers!

Having read the paper book twice, and thought of little else since, I still needed more, so I listened to this. The narrator does a very good job, though occasionally sounds a little more excited or breathless than the voice I had in my head as I read. Still, as long as you're paying close attention I think this is one of the better audio interpretations I've heard.

I believe the following (though I do not claim to be authoritatively correct!): The novel is concerned with asking very big and fundamental questions like: "What does it mean to be a person?" "What is a good life?" "What is it to experience joy, or suffering?".

It asks these by means of depriving it's main character of almost everything that makes a human life and then exploring what's left. Because of this, the story itself is often profoundly bleak and upsetting. However, I believe its message and its core are fundamentally hopeful and positive about the human condition and the inherent beauty therein.

Despite how it appears during the first half, I do not personally believe this is a particularly feminist text. I think the author is trying to ask the questions in the way that she's chosen, and doesn't want her characters to be striving and struggling through the trials of the story because "that's just what big, tough men have to do". I think she wants them to struggle, and to be tough because that's what people have to do, regardless of gender.

Traumatised, lost and confused, the nameless protagonist exists in an infinite, absurdist, existentialist nightmare. It is a sort of quiet Hell; senseless, barren and always cruel. This world refuses ever to explain itself, only becoming more confusing as the story goes on. But there is much more to this novel than the characters and the story, striking and bizarre though they are.

In order to avoid ruining your experience, I will not say anything more about this book other than if you are open-minded enough to try something quite different you might just have an experience like I did. Nothing else I've ever read has made me think as deeply or as much as this novel has.

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Life-changing. An absolute must read. Skip the intro!

What can I say about this book: I will never stop thinking about it. Haunting, dystopian, bleak, thought-provoking - and an incredible performance by the narrator. Would not hesitate to recommend

Leave the Intro and come back to it at the end!

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