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Title: The World Before Us

Author: Aislinn Hunter

Narrator: Fiona Hardingham

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-28-16

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of The World Before Us by Aislinn Hunter, read by Fiona Hardingham.

Jane was 15 when her life changed forever. In the woods surrounding a Yorkshire country house, she took her eyes off the little girl she was minding, and the girl slipped into the trees - never to be seen again.

Now an adult, Jane is obsessed with another disappearance: that of a young woman who walked out of a Victorian lunatic asylum one day in 1877. As Jane pieces together moments in history, forgotten stories emerge - of sibling jealousy, illicit affairs and tragic death....

Critic Reviews:

"A tantalising mystery...beguiling and richly suggestive." (Metro)

"Strange and absorbing.... I relished this book." (Penelope Lively, The New York Times Book Review)

"Sensitive, melancholy, sharply observant. A work of great power." (Guardian)

"Ambitious, inticate...cleverly innovates while tipping a nod to classic Gothic tropes: dynastic rivalries, crumbling country houses, madhouses and vanished girls." [National Post (Canada)]

"A brilliant work of humanity and imagination, artful and breathtakingly beautiful. It will continue to haunt long after you have finished reading." (Helen Humphreys, author of Nocturne)

"Powerful, thought-provoking, haunting and haunted.... Reminiscent of A. S. Byatt's Possession, it forces you to look at the world - the people around you, the objects they hold dear - in a different light." [Globe and Mail (Canada)]

Members Reviews:

Brilliant though incomplete

I have to give this book five stars because I loved it and that's the basis of Amazon reviews. I really enjoyed reading every page and looked forward to coming back to the book after a break. The device of the voices of the ghosts was particularly effective in reinforcing the tenuous link between past and future.

From a critical point of view though there are some problems. The book just feels incomplete. There are simply too many things unresolved at the end. The central McGuffin - what happened to N- - is solved, but in the end that was not the interesting problem. The authorial end note indicates how this may have come to be the case but one is left at the end wanting more resolution. Not everything needs to be resolved, especially given the nature of this novel, but certainly more than is.

"The in-between we think of as `now.' "

We begin with the disappearance of Lily, a five-year-old girl who while out on a hike vanishes from her sitter, Jane Standen, who is 15 and who is minding her while Lily's father has gone ahead on their excursion. Warning: that is never resolved. (There they go! Headin' fer the exits.)

Ah, but for those who remain I shall elaborate a bit.Jane, now 34, is losing her job at a small London museum closing for lack of funds; she commits a compulsive act at the closing lecture, and without telling those who care about her flees back to the town where Lily disappears. Hunkering down in an inn, she returns to a research project she's long worked on, in which she attempts to reconstruct another disappearance--that of young woman known only as "N." N had disappeared from an insane asylum in the 1870s, accompanying two of the inmates who have forayed off the grounds.