Got this as a proof. And I can't decide if I liked it. After getting used to the style ( no "talking" marks anywhere in the book - which totally annoyed me) I wanted to see where everything tied in. It took about 3 chapters to adjust to the style and to be honest I found it hard work. Maybe people who rave on about Style and Lyrical Text and all that jazz will love it. Maybe it is some sort of experimental form. Personally I found it distracting and irritating.

One to read slowly so you can savour every beautiful sentence * Good Housekeeping (Book of the Month) * I feel what I'm trying to do is to show another way for men," she told ABC RN's Big Weekend of Books. A charming, magical read. The writing is superb, almost poetical and the characters well-developed. A Year of Marvellous Ways is the story of Marvellous - her life and loves and Drake who arrives at her caravan by the sea in Cornwall, England. It is an unusual book and it took me awhile to acclimatise to it. I am used to speeding through a book! It takes a little while to get into the rhythm of reading it, I found it has to be read slowly - no skipping or I just might miss something. An old woman at the end of her life and a young man at the beginning of his. Young, broken Francis Drake comes into the old woman’s sphere of existence to deliver a letter, and finds deliverance for himself. Through her stories of her life and the beauty of nature surrounding them, he finds healing and purpose.

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The plot had more coincidences and unexpected relations than Jane Eyre and most of them I found to be unnecessary. The story kept me reading in spite of all this so the writer is onto something. Toward then end of the book I did find myself skimming the text rather than reading thoroughly -I just wanted it finished and to find out what happened to the characters. I really enjoyed this book, but I can’t really put my finger on why! I felt a lot of emotions towards Marvellous, The Winter Book Club gave me the perfect opportunity to give Sarah Winman’s latest offering a queue jump. Love. It's the only thing to have faith in... Or the moon. Something that turns up every day when you can't. The sun. The moon. Anything. You have to have faith in something.”

Marvellous Ways is eighty-nine years old and the Creek she calls home is almost all she’s ever known. She spends her days sitting by the river, telescope in hand, waiting for something – she’s not sure what but she’ll know when she sees it. It would make a great book for a book club- as the writing style may not appeal to everyone but would promote great discussions- and there are reading group questions at the end of the book. This is a perfectly decent basis for a story and character study. I am in sympathy with its message of finding the depth in things, finding the depth in yourself and putting that depth into what you say and do. I have spent a lot of time in Cornwall and in its more secret places, and I think it truly is a healing, almost magical place. All of this should have made me like this book a lot, but I'm sorry to say that I don't think it is well enough done to make it really work.Both Marvellous and Francis have tales of love and loss to tell, though their lives were seemingly worlds apart. An array of entrancing stories from them both are littered throughout, but they are perfectly knitted together – during the course of which dreams are shattered, realities made and magic happens.

And that marvellously doesn’t sound pretentious or overly-pronounced but authentic and real with a dash of the sort of otherworldiness and magic that many of us wish routinely came with everyday life. When I say Marvellous is less straightforward, it's not meant negatively. She's just not such an open book. Eventually we do learn of her past as she talks to Drake revealing an episode a night, like a less dangerous, less threatening version of 1001 Arabian Nights. There is also a touch of inbuilt mystique in that Sarah doesn't spoon feed us. We are allowed – and positively encouraged – to come to our own conclusions. Is Marvellous a bit batty or is some of what she says accurate? The mad woman in the woods as some locals call her or a sage with an unusual heritage? If you are an inveterate reader, the odds are good, better than good actually, that fellow readers or close friends (sometimes, happily, they are both) that at some point they will recommend a book to you. A book, they will assure you with a mix of solemnity and enthusiasm, is Continue Reading The novel speaks of integration for both Marvellous and Drake as they share with each other their lives and are heard. They are a blessing and gift for each other, and while the final surprise was no surprise it was still satisfying.

Summary

Certainly Marvellous, a spry woman who swims naked in the creek near her caravan, who lies a candle in the half-sunken church that sits in an island between the waters and who lives and eat off the land that is her home and a character in itself, has had reason enough to give up on life on many occasions. Waiting is what 89-year old Marvellous spends the year 1947 doing, in an isolated Cornish hamlet, although she isn’t sure what she is waiting for. This might seem like a less-than-engaging narrative device, but Sarah Winman creates gripping suspense while unfolding Marvellous’s memories, from lonely nights spent “willing her life to change” to the time “Whatshisname” was lured in her direction by a Louis Armstrong song playing on the wireless. Paths cross in unexpected ways in this pacey plot. An unlikely friendship develops at the core of the compelling tale when Marvellous meets a troubled young soldier, Drake. Storytelling rejuvenates Drake: as Marvellous shares stories of her life resonating with the transcendent power of love, Drake learns how to marvel at life again, seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. “Everyone had a limit,” writes Winman, engrossingly showing characters pushed past their breaking point. The novel’s surprising denouement is also well worth the wait. . I awoke dazed, looking up through a portal to a star-drenched sky. And beyond the stars bands of milky light stretched out to the hush of infinity. In Still Life and her other novels, Winman also draws non-traditional families, often made up of men who take on roles as primary carers.