So Many Ways to Begin: A Novel
by:
Jon McGregor (author)
Now in paperback for the first time, So Many Ways to Begin is a potent examination of family and memory, a look at what happens when life forces you to let go of the person you might have been. David Carter is an obsessive collector, and the curator of the local history museum. In addition to...
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Now in paperback for the first time, So Many Ways to Begin is a potent examination of family and memory, a look at what happens when life forces you to let go of the person you might have been. David Carter is an obsessive collector, and the curator of the local history museum. In addition to overseeing the community's archives, he has, since boyhood, diligently archived the items that tell his own life story: birth certificate, school report cards, movie and train tickets. But when a senile relative lets slip a long-buried family secret, David is forced to consider that his whole carefully cataloged life may be constructed around a lie. In fits and starts, his world begins to unravel.Praise for So Many Ways to Begin:"Jon McGregor might be the best chronicler I know of the way small accidents can set a life in motion, and the way what's said between people-or left unsaid-can change everything. This is a beautiful book, elegant and particular and heart wrenching. I loved it."-Maile Meloy, author of Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It"McGregor is a brilliant prose stylist, and here he excels at making … the ordinary seem extraordinary."-Sunday Times (UK )
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781596914858 (1596914858)
Publish date: December 21st 2010
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages no: 384
Edition language: English
bookshelves: published-2006, one-penny-wonder, hardback, autumn-2013, paper-read, lit-richer, coventry, wwii, britain-england, aberdeenshire, britain-ireland, britain-scotland, slit-yer-wrists-gloomy, mental-health, plague-disease, bullies, families Read from September 04 to November 19, 2013 Dedi...
Dedication: To AliceOpening: They came in the morning, early, walking with the others along tracks and lanes and roads, across fields, down the long low hills which led to the slow pull of the river, down to the open gateways in the city walls, the hours and days of walking showing in the slow shift...
David Carter - Curator of a local museum; obsessive collector and archivist of his own life........until a senile relative reveals a long-buried family secret. Then David's life slips out of orbit. So begins his own personal Reconstruction..and his coming to terms with the fact that his life has not...
There are so many ways to begin this review, but, then, that's always the hard part, isn't it...beginning....This is a book I want to shove in the hands of every reader I meet. "Read this one," I might coax cajolingly. "It's good. You'll like it." Like the characters in this book, I have a hard tim...