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This Shining Life

By: Harriet Kline
Narrated by: Olivia Darnley
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

For Rich, life is golden. He fizzes with happiness and love. But Rich has an incurable brain tumour.

After Rich dies, his wife, Ruth, can't see how to how to keep living and their young son, Ollie, is intent on working out the meaning of life. Because everything happens for a reason. Doesn't it?

Rich leaves behind a family without a father, a husband, a son and a best friend. And he also leaves behind a present for each of them. But while Ollie tries to understand the message within each present, Ruth finds herself adrift. The grief that is threatening to drown her has also unearthed long-buried pain. Pain she has to face if she is to have any chance of moving on....

Harriet Kline weaves together the voices of a grieving family and paints an achingly beautiful picture of love in all its forms: absent, lost and, ultimately, regained.

©2021 Harriet Kline (P)2021 Penguin Audio
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Well crafted and poignant story

This first novel by Harriet Klein is an intelligently written and wonderfully crafted moving story about death, loss, love, family dynamics, emotional literacy, Neuro atypicality and how difficult it is to behave congruently with our feelings at times of ggrief. It focuses on seven characters who are variously the wife, son, mother-in-law, parents and friend/sister-in-law of Rich before and after his death, charting their journey. it explores the part that family Dynamics and stuckness played in everyone’s grieving processes. The story is drawn together around an 11-year-old boy with some form of neuro atypicality and his unwavering desire to solve the riddle of the meaning of life through the gifts his father had given out before his death.

The book is very well read.

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