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Flora

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Flora by Gail Godwin, read by Tara Ward

From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Gail Godwin, "a luminously written, heartbreaking book" (John Irving).

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three, Helen lost her mother, and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother’s twenty-two-year-old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America, will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.

This darkly beautiful novel about a child and a caretaker in isolation evokes shades of The Turn of the Screw and also harks back to Godwin's memorable novel of growing up The Finishing School. With a house on top of a mountain and a child who may be a bomb that will one day go off, Flora tells a story of love, regret, and the things we can't undo.

Critics Review

Remorse may be the defining emotion for our narrator, Helen, but Godwin the writer has nothing to regret: Flora is an elegant little creeper of a story.
NPR Fresh Air
Godwin is repelled by the saccharine psychology of our age. In her finest books, including the three that have been finalists for the National Book Award, we confront spiritual matters in unusually hard terms . . . [The narrator's] recollection of that tragic summer, turned over and over in her mind for years, is something between a search for understanding and a mournful confession. But finally it's a testament to the power of storytelling to bring solace when none other is possible.
The Washington Post
Three-time National Book Award finalist Godwin creates memorable characters and conversations that carry us effortlessly toward a dark denouement, one that infuses the rest of Helen's life with profound appreciation for Flora's unguarded heart.
People
Flora is Godwin at her best, a compelling story about Helen's growth of consciousness told with fearless candor and the poignant wisdom of hindsight.
Boston Globe
Like Turn of the Screw and Atonement, Flora is a study of the way ghosts can haunt our childhood memories while guilt haunts our lives.
Wiley Cash, author of THIS DARK ROAD TO MERCY
Author Gail Godwin
Narrator Tara Ward
Duration 8 hours and 15 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781639739707
Format Audiobook
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Genre Fiction: general and literary, Modern and contemporary fiction
Availability US

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