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    The Heart Is a Burial Ground
    The Heart Is a Burial Ground
    The Heart Is a Burial Ground
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Heart Is a Burial Ground

    Written by Tamara Colchester

    Narrated by Jennifer Woodward, Esther Wane and Katie Beudert

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    'I will describe it as best I can. This is their story. Or perhaps just mine. Let us begin, again . . .'

    A vivid and inventive debut novel about four generations of women in a family, their past and their legacy, which evokes the work of Kate Atkinson, Tessa Hadley and Virginia Baily.

    On a brisk day in 1970, a daughter arrives at her mother’s home to take care of her as she nears the end of her life. ‘Home’ is the sprawling Italian castle of Roccasinibalda, and Diana’s mother is the legendary Caresse Crosby, one half of literature’s most scandalous couple in 1920s Paris, widow of Harry Crosby, the American heir, poet and publisher who epitomised the ‘Lost Generation’.
     
    But it was not only Harry who was lost. Their incendiary love story concealed a darkness that marked mercurial Diana and still burns through the generations: through Diana's troubled daughters Elena and Leonie, and Elena’s young children.
     
    Moving between the decades, between France, Italy and the Channel Islands, Tamara Colchester’s debut novel is an unforgettably powerful portrait of a line of extraordinary women, and the inheritance they give their daughters.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio UK
    Release dateMar 8, 2018
    ISBN9781471175039
    Author

    Tamara Colchester

    Tamara Colchester is a descendant of Caresse Crosby and was inspired by her family history to write this exceptional work of fiction, her debut novel. Tamara is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in various publications, including AnOther Magazine. She lives in West Sussex.

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    • 4/5
      What can a daughter learn from her mother? Four generations of women of one family suffer from their respective mother’s way of life, the choices they made and the future they planned for their kids. The first generation is embodied by Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby’s wife, a young American who freed herself from Puritan Bostonian convictions and was looking for freedom and a life for the arts in Europe. Her daughter Diana grows up in Paris between all the famous people of the so called “Lost Generation” and never had to chance to just be a girl, too much was projected in her. Diana’s daughters Elena and Leonie found ways of opposing their mother by opting for very traditional models of love and life. Elena’s young children, one even unborn, are now the fourth generation who grows up with a heavy legacy. The novel oscillates between times and places. We meet the Parisian It-crowd of the twenties when Caresse and Harry have their big time and Diana is just a girl. Then we jump to Caresse’s last days in Italy, decades after she has lost her husband and when her grand-daughters are already grown-up women. Another 20 years on, Diana’s life is coming to an end. Yet, no matter what point in time in general or in the characters’ life, the core question is always the same: what do you expect from life and how much love do you need?Alternating the setting surely makes the novel lively, on the other hand, the development of the characters suffers from this non-linear or non-chronological arrangement. Even though you can make out especially Diana’s development, her daughters, for example, remained a bit a mystery for me. What I found intriguing, however, was the highly complex mother-daughter relationship which becomes very clear in every constellation: on the one hand, unconditional love and the hope that the daughter can break away from conventions and find love and happiness in life, on the other hand, the fact that they cannot live up to their own ideals and that wishes are not fulfilled makes them also reproachful and mean in their later life. It is quite interesting to see that the author Tamara Colchester herself is a descendant of this family. This raises the question of how much fiction and how much reality you can find in the text. No matter the answer, it’s a novel about strong women and the choices we make in our lives.