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Title: Leaving the World

Author: Douglas Kennedy

Narrator: Kate Harper

Format: Unabridged

Length: 18 hrs and 49 mins

Language: English

Release date: 09-16-10

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 10 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

On the night of her 13th birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents she would never get married and she would never have children. But life, as Jane comes to discover, is a profoundly random business.

Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then Jane falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.

Just when she has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for some sort of personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.

Douglas Kennedys exceptional new novel is a portrait of the way we live now, of the many routes we follow in the course of a single life, and of the arbitrary nature of destiny. Like his previous highly acclaimed novels it is also a compulsive read and one which speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.

Members Reviews:

Seriously? This book got published?

A genuinely bad story with an equally bad narrator.

To use Douglas Kennedys repetitive reference to the word narrative, this one is exceptionally weak. Its basically just two different stories lumped together. Its as though he desperately needed to get a book out so he blabbered on and on through one meaningless story, trying to find a path for it. Then completely out of the blue, he had a bright idea for a better storyline, so to avoid having to re-write the entire thing, he just shoved the two stories together so that it might sound interesting and not be kicked clean out the door by the publishers. He didnt even have the decency to bother to try and find a link between the two stories. And then to add insult to injury, he ended the book with an unfinished plot and a lame cliché.

The first three quarters of the book are so pointless that I would suggest to any listener that they completely skip past both Parts 1 and 2, and start listening from one hour into Part 3. This is the only section of the entire book that contains any semblance of a real plot and has some guts to it. Everything else prior to this point makes the main protagonist look weak, directionless and pathetically gullible. Part 1 and Part 2 are simply there to pass the time.

Then theres the false notion that Douglas Kennedy has about his ability to convincingly pull off a lead female protagonist. How many women do you know who repeatedly use phrases like dropping money on buying a sports car or renting a flat, or chasing down pills with Vodka? Seriously? He really imagines women talk like this?

And finally we get to the narrator. Kate Harpers manly voice is so gruff, it sounds like shes smoked way too many boxes of Marlboros in her time.