- Hardcover: 160 pages
- Publisher: Chatto & Windus (May 11 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0701183403
- ISBN-13: 978-0701183400
- Product Dimensions: 14 x 1.4 x 20.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 281 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #205,699 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
What happens to a family when one of the brothers publishes his “misery memoir?” Is his litany of childhood torment a complete invention? Or was there really a cupboard under the stairs?
The farmhouse was called The Beacon and they had been born and reared there, May, Colin, Frank and Berenice, but only May had been left for the last 27 years . . .
May had been the clever daughter and she had escaped the shelter of The Beacon, just once, to go to university. But in London she had been pursued by nameless terrors, the victim of fears and anxieties. Now she was the spinster daughter, the one who stayed, who nursed her father after his accident and looked after her mother in her old age.
Frank was the one who got away. He married and moved on. But why does no one ever mention Frank’s name?
Richly atmospheric, evoking mystery, ambiguity and suspense, The Beacon is a novella which continues to resonate beyond the final pages.
The farmhouse was called The Beacon and they had been born and reared there, May, Colin, Frank and Berenice, but only May had been left for the last 27 years . . .
May had been the clever daughter and she had escaped the shelter of The Beacon, just once, to go to university. But in London she had been pursued by nameless terrors, the victim of fears and anxieties. Now she was the spinster daughter, the one who stayed, who nursed her father after his accident and looked after her mother in her old age.
Frank was the one who got away. He married and moved on. But why does no one ever mention Frank’s name?
Richly atmospheric, evoking mystery, ambiguity and suspense, The Beacon is a novella which continues to resonate beyond the final pages.
About the Author
Susan Hill’s novels and short stories have won the Whitbread, Somerset Maugham and John Llewelyn Rhys awards, and been shortlisted for the Booker. She is the author of the ghost stories The Woman in Black; The Mist in the Mirror; and The Man in the Picture, and of the series of crime novels featuring policeman Simon Serrailler.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Desolate Story with Atmosphere to Match,
By
This review is from: The Beacon (Hardcover)
Reason for Reading: I have tried (and enjoy) the author's mystery series and wanted to try some of her fiction.With a novella one can't say much about the plot without telling the whole story. So briefly. Set in the "North Country" of England a family of four children grew up in the fifties on a farm far from any neighbors but with a little village close enough by. After they've all grown, one of the boys leaves the area for good never to return. This book examines how that effects those left behind, while it examines their past and their present especially through the eyes of May, the eldest daughter. Beautifully written in stark language. This is a desolate story full of atmosphere to match. It actually has a Gothic feel with the lonely farmhouse, named The Beacon, and the silence inside as it contains May and her dying mother, then May and her mother's body and finally May on her own. I enjoyed the process of reading this but as often happens with books so short I wanted more. I really wanted to know more about May, but I think that was the whole point of the story. Right from the beginning we are aware that their is a secret and then in my mind I felt as if their were two secrets and only one of them is revealed. The final ending has me stumped. I'm not sure I understand it all. Oh, I have some ideas and one that pervades is it tells the answer to the second secret but it's not what I suspected. I'll be thinking about this for a while. Susan Hill fans will definitely want to read this, but if you haven't read the author before it's best not to start with this ambiguous story.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Susan Hill at Novella Length,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Beacon (Hardcover)
Following up the recent series novel by Susan Hill that I just read with a novella by her from 2008,The Beacon is a stand-alone short novel about an ordinary English farming family in mid-20th-Century moving toward the 21st, two parents and four children, growing up and living ordinary lives, some more content and some less so. But one of the siblings, Frank the second son, makes a mark in London as a journalist and, after marrying a wealthy widow who (conveniently) dies early, writes a best-selling tell-all about his horrible life of abuse on the family farm as a child. Only it's not true, not one word of it as far as the abuse is concerned, but he uses his family's name and his siblings' names and describes the real farmhouse and the real life within it, so that everybody who knows the family believes they have done these evil, terrible things to a child, which never happened. Why did he do this? How do the siblings react? This is the meat of the story, told primarily through the voice of sibling May, the one daughter who remained at home - there's always one in these tales - to care for the parents, and keep the family home together, with little or no appreciation until it's all too late. This is a heartbreaking short novel, but at the same time a frustrating one because, for me anyway, the reasons for Frank's inventions are never made clear; in the end, I just felt sad.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quiet, mysterious and bleak,
By Alison "girlrunning" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Beacon (Hardcover)
This novella had a quiet, mysterious and gothic feeling and it was certainly an easy read. However, by the end of the book I thought it was too much of a light touch and wasn't enough for a short book - instead it felt like a longer book with the intensity taken out. Maybe Hill wanted the bleakness to come through with the lack of things explained too? There are some thought provoking elements but for me there was not enough substance and the messages or themes that the author was trying to convey were not clear. The relationships between the characters are not described deeply enough and the ending feels too open to me. The ending was somewhat rushed and I'm sure the story could have gone on much further and in more detail.Three stars for the quality of writing and the vivid feelings of bleakness and strained relationships but I felt frustrated at what was missing from this book. |
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