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    We That Are Left
    We That Are Left
    We That Are Left
    Audiobook16 hours

    We That Are Left

    Written by Clare Clark

    Narrated by Shaun Grindell

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It is 1910. Jessica and Phyllis Melville have grown up at Ellinghurst, their family estate. A headstrong beauty, Jessica longs for London-the glitter and glamor of debutante life- while bookish Phyllis dreams in vain of attending the university. Neither girl questions that it is Theo, their adored brother, whom their mother loves best. Theo eclipses everyone around him, including the diffident Oskar Grunewald, who is a frequent visitor to Ellinghurst. Fascinated by the house but alternately tormented and ignored by the Melville children, Oskar seeks refuge in Ellinghurst's enormous library.

    Over the next decade, as the Great War devastates and reshapes their world, the sisters come of age in a country unrecognizable from the idylls of their youth. As they struggle to forge new paths in a world that no longer plays by the old rules, Oskar's life becomes entwined with theirs once again, in ways that will change all of their futures forever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9781494588021
    We That Are Left
    Author

    Clare Clark

    CLARE CLARK is the author of four novels, including The Great Stink, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and Savage Lands, also long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her work has been translated into five languages. She lives in London.

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    Reviews for We That Are Left

    3.5/5

    28 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This novel has something like the feel of Downton Abbey, but with a more tragic atmosphere. The uncertain inheritance of a grand English estate drives much of the plot. After the death of Theo in World War I, the Melvilles are left with only two daughters and heavy debts. The male cousins next in line to inherit have vowed to sell off the house which means so much to Sir Aubrey Melville and he begins exploring alternative methods to find someone to carry on the business of running his estate. Meanwhile, his wife struggles with her grief over their son, turning to seances and mediums to find solance, and his daughters seek out their own paths. And then there's Oscar, an old family friend, who may be unknowingly harboring a few secrets of his own. Overall, this made for a good read, although I would have appreciated a slightly different conclusion.
    • 4/5
      Not a bad book to start the new year! A little predictable and patchwork in its themes and characters, but altogether readable. I didn't really like any of the Melville family apart from Phyllis - run, Phyllis, run! - and Oscar is the kind of self-pitying scholar that sets my teeth on edge, but the atmosphere of the house, in all its decaying Victorian fakery, and the frustration felt by the lost generation just after the First World War are brought to life in evocative detail. Poor Aubrey!
    • 2/5
      The Melvilles are an aristocratic British family living at Ellinghurst - a family estate that has its share of secrets.

      During the Melvilles' childhood Ellinghurst was a place of adventure except for family friend Oskar who is picked on and finds solace in the library among the many books. After the Great War the big house loses its charm for sisters Jessica and Phyllis. Jessica longs for the glitz and glamour of London life while her bookworm sister Phyllis dreams of university.

      The book started off fine even though at the very beginning it was confusing with all the people. I really liked Jessica. Clark's writing was good. But this book was loooooooooooong. Oskar's chapters were boring with all the physics and science and math. Then eventually the whole book was boring and there were too many "bruised" clouds.

      I received a free copy from Goodreads First Reads.
    • 3/5
      This historical fiction novel begins in 1910 and ends in 1920, with the pivotal event of the story taking place in 1915, when the beloved eldest son of Eleanor and Aubrey Melville, Theo, dies in World War I.Eleanor has always preferred Theo to her two daughters, Phyllis and Jessica, pathologically so. After Theo’s death, Eleanor embarks on the construction of a memorial on the grounds of their estate, Ellinghurst in Hampsire, and begins to go to psychics regularly. When one is exposed as a fraud, Eleanor is not deterred; she just finds another.Aubrey too doesn’t have much interest in his daughters; he is obsessed with the estate and with passing on it and his baronetcy to a male heir. When Theo died, those hopes died too. Now Cousin Evelyn is due to inherit, and Evelyn has no interest in maintaining Ellinghurst. Aubrey comes up with a rather unorthodox alternative.Meanwhile, Phyllis and Jessica have been negatively affected by their parents’ neglect. Phyllis is more interested in archeology and the long-dead than the living, and Jessica is a mean-spirited, self-centered spoiled brat who uses her looks to gain entrance to a world of parties and nightclubs.Both the girls get involved in different ways with Oscar, Eleanor’s godson. Oscar is also damaged; his long-dead father was German, filling Oscar with self-hatred (because of attitudes Oscar internalized during the war), and he loses himself in the study of science.Discussion: The author has her characters engage in some intriguing thinking about the nature of war, and about whether matter is actually more “real” than energy.But basically, this is a sad story of two very dysfunctional families that are tied together, and about the selfishness and destructiveness of their behavior. There are hardly any lives in this book that aren’t ruined in one way or another. The worst part for me though was the ending; it was not only depressing, but entirely unsatisfactory, in my opinion.
    • 3/5
      I really liked the first book I read by this author, The Nature of Monsters, so I then read two more: The Great Stink and Beautiful Lies. I didn't especially like either of them, but being a slow learner and having forgotten that Beautiful Lies just annoyed me, I gave this new one, We That are Left, a try despite the grammatically incorrect title.As I said, I am a slow learner. And I somewhat enjoyed the majority of the book. The family members all seemed rather nasty at the beginning, and I didn't grow to love them, nor did they grow to be lovable, but I did find them and their poor and selfish decisions worth reading about. I liked the historical references, the talk of Spiritualism that was so popular those days, and the touch of a ghost story interwoven into the rest of the story. The metaphors of tadpoles for both rain and words, in different chapters, was jarring, but not overdone to the point of Maribel's smoking in Beautiful Lies. The story fell apart for me in the last 20% or so of the book. It devolved into a rather boring but overwrought romance, more soap opera than novel. I think it is time for me to recognize that this author is just not my kind of author, and move on.
    • 2/5
      I had a very hard time getting into this book, mainly because I just didn't care about any of the hothouse characters. They were more than odd, they were all spoiled, self-centered, obsessive, and mean, whether children or adults. I know the author meant to portray an upper crust family, but I really don't want to read about people that I dislike so much. It also bothered me that they seemed to be drawn not from Downton Abbey, as one reader suggested, but from Ian McEwan's Atonement (even though the latter's setting began just prior to World War II). And there was way too much detailed description of THINGS! I kept waiting for something to happen or for the characters to get more interesting. For me, neither ever happened. Very dry. If I want to get the flavor of World War I and its effect on England, I'll go back to Pat Barker's Regeneration series, or even Mrs. Dalloway. This was just plain boring, in my opinion.