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This Strange Eventful History

By: Claire Messud
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
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Summary

*A TIME MAGAZINE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024 *
*AN OPRAH DAILY MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2024*
*AN OBSERVER 2024 PICK*
*A GUARDIAN 2024 PICK*

'An epic family odyssey... ambitious and compelling' Guardian Book of the Day

June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.

A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.
©2024 Claire Messud (P)2024 Hachette Audio UK
Family Life Literary Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction
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Critic reviews

'A choral mural of sweep and scope that knows just when to render the historical personal, Claire Messud's epic is above all a wise, wary, yet love-struck chronicle of how the selves we strive to make become "colonized" by family.' (Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winner of THE NETANYAHU’S)

'This Strange Eventful History is an astonishment - rich and luminous, dense with life, wide with wisdom. Messud's view of the Cassar family - and we suspect as we read it, her own - is as emotionally precise and imaginatively capacious as her rendering of the history that shapes their fortunes. Rarely has the private magic of familial love been so fully realized in a public act of literature. Just exquisite.' (Ayad Akhtar)

'One of those rare novels which a reader doesn't merely read but lives through with the characters . . . Claire Messud is a magnificent storyteller.' (Yiyun Li)

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Awful reading

I haven’t listened past the first chapter so can’t comment on the story. The reading, however, is truly awful. Each protagonist is given a laughable French accent while speaking in English. It’s like an episode of ‘Allo, Allo’ in the Eighties….

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