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    The House at the Edge of the World
    The House at the Edge of the World
    The House at the Edge of the World
    Audiobook9 hours

    The House at the Edge of the World

    Written by Julia Rochester

    Narrated by Avita Jay

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    John Venton's drunken fall from a cliff leaves his family with an embarrassing ghost. His twin children, Morwenna and Corwin, flee in separate directions as their mother, enraged by years of unhappy marriage, embraces merry widowhood. Only their grandfather finds solace in the crumbling house, endlessly painting their story onto a large canvas map. As the twins are drawn back to the house, they discover that their father's absence is part of the map's mysterious pull.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateJun 4, 2015
    ISBN9781510007376
    The House at the Edge of the World

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    Reviews for The House at the Edge of the World

    3.5/5

    30 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Twins Morwenna and Corwin Venton are spending the final summer of their childhood in their family home on the North Devon Coast, eagerly awaiting the autumn when they will leave for University. Their family had been the local landowners although all the land is now gone: only the house remains, where their grandfather Matthew, and parents John and Valerie, live an ill-suited existence. John hates his job as an architect designing houses that he thinks are a blot on the landscape, Valerie feels trapped as a country wife with a taciturn and undemonstrative husband, while Matthew has spent the last fifty years painting an incredibly detailed map of the land surrounding the house that encompasses his whole life. And then one night their father doesn't come home from a beery evening playing folk music in the local pub, his equally drunk friend has seen him fall from the cliff path into the sea. As the years go by, Morwenna and Corwin go their separate ways: her to a career of book-binding in London and him as a water engineer in the trouble spots of the world, but the summer of their father's death continues to haunt them.The book begins with Robert Frost's poem 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep':The people along the sandAll turn and look one way.They turn their back on the land.They look at the sea all day.What is noticeable about this book is that even though the Venton's house looks out over the sea, it's the land that is the focus of its inhabitants.This was an enjoyable book which kept me reading till the end. The sense of place is well drawn, and I appreciated the evocation of the coastal landscape. I think I'd have enjoyed it a little more, though, if the main characters had a few more redeeming qualities. And while Morwenna and Corwin are well drawn as teenagers, they are less believable in their mid-thirties. This is a first novel though, and I'll certainly look out for more by this author.
    • 4/5
      A man falls from a high point into the sea and is lost. I am reminded of the myth of Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who on his way to freedom flew too close to the sun so that its heat melted the wax holding together the feathers of his artificial wings and he fell from the heavens. Pieter Brueghel the Elder's painting on this subject famously shows his fall as unnoticed by ordinary people such as a ploughman, a shepherd and an angler.But when John Venton falls off a cliff somewhere facing the North Atlantic on the southwestern peninsula of England his absence is very definitely noticed by his family -- by his wife Valerie, by his twin children Morwenna and Corwin, by his father Matthew -- and by his friend Bob, who was too drunk at the time to notice what happened. The impact that this disappearance (no body is ever found) has on the evidently dysfunctional family is far-reaching, stretching years into the future; and the time comes when the twins, who were of school-leaving age when their father disappeared, start to question the received wisdom.Julia Rochester's debut novel is a real corker. The narrator is Morwenna who certainly doesn't suffer fools gladly. She goes to work as a bookbinder in London, while her brother Corwin travels the world to work on projects helping local communities. John's wife remarries John's best friend Bob and moves out of the family home (Thornton: a memory of Brontë's Thornfield Hall, perhaps?) leaving John's father Matthew to manage on his own. Morwenna's eccentric grandfather has been painting a giant map of the area with Thornton at its centre: the six-by-six-foot canvas is based on a circular area with a radius of twelve miles. Imagine something like the Hereford Cathedral Mappa Mundi, complete with "wandering saints and wronged women and poet priests; its contradictory seasons, snowdrops and roses, fruit and blossom, spring cubs and autumn hunters." It is this map that dominates the narrative as much as the outside landscape, against which all the drama takes place and which provides the final clue that precipitates the denouement.John Venton is likened to Sir Galahad, but like that pure, idealised Arthurian knight he is a bit of an enigma. What really motivates him, and how is it that he could be so careless on that fateful night? Galahad is known as the figure who went in quest of the Holy Grail, but for the Venton siblings their quest -- over seventeen years and more -- is to find out what happened to their father. When Corwin eventually gets 'compassion fatigue' in his career and Morwenna virtually engineers a failed relationship we realise that they and the other participants are really searching for love: whether parent-child, sister-brother or husband-wife we know that the task will be long and arduous and that some will never succeed.Julia Rochester's characters are so well-drawn that we feel they could be real -- believable humans with gentleness and talents, but also fierceness and foibles. Spiky Morwenna is too often superficial, just as she binds books without any curiosity about their contents; but she is not afraid to speak her mind. Corwin appears to exhibit strength of character by helping the disadvantaged around the work but, when it comes to facing his demons, his courage fails him; yet he worries away at things like a terrier with a rabbit. Matthew, rather like his missing son, retreats into his own inner world as those on the autistic spectrum often do; and yet he has the artistic talent to recreate that world in a masterpiece that is his consuming obsession.Like the sea and the land which bisect the map that Matthew makes, everyone is composed of near equal parts of strengths and weaknesses; in common with this house at the edge of the world they too face the inscrutable ocean, but are confined -- whether they like it or not -- to the land. As the Robert Frost poem that prefaces the novel has it, "The people along the sand | All turn and look one way. | They turn their back on the land. | They look at the sea all day." Being unable to fathom its depths doesn't stop these people watching, watching, watching.Like all good stories The House at the Edge of the World has this quality: the ability to get under the skin. The reader may wonder whether, after the watery baptism that opens the book, the main protagonists are ever going to make new lives -- and new loves -- for themselves; for their sakes we may certainly hope so. Ubi caritas? Will they ever find it?
    • 5/5
      That is the great story of a twin couple who their youth and the last 17 years see themselves robbed by the tragic death of their father. Their mother was no great help at this time. On the contrary unspoken animosities make contact difficult. Only the grandfather still seems to treat the twins the same. One day provides Corwin a heretical question his twin sister, and thus the whole tragedy and the lost years begins to break up. It was a very exciting reading.