When You're Gone

By: Brooke Harris

Narrated by: Aoife McMahon, Grainne Gillis

Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

Compelling, heart-breaking, and emotionally vivid, When You’re Gone will break your heart and fix it anew. A gripping and emotional novel about family, love and sacrifice.

It is 1958: In a small town like Athenry, people talk. Everyone’s noticed that the injury which stopped Annie Fagan’s father from working doesn’t prevent him from hitting his wife. But a man’s home is his castle, and no one is going to intervene. Until Annie runs into Arthur ‘Sketch’ Talbot. Sketch is determined to help Annie, and the two soon fall in love. But Annie’s father won’t give his daughter up lightly, and Sketch’s attempts to save her will have devastating consequences....

Now: Holly’s world is falling apart. Her unborn baby is seriously ill, her relationship is fracturing before her eyes, and her Nana is dying. But Nana has one final wish before she leaves: to read, one last time, the handwritten story of her first – and last – love, Arthur ‘Sketch’ Talbot. As Holly reads to Nana, could it help her find the strength to face her own future? Could fulfilling her grandmother’s final wish really be a gift for Holly?

©2019 Brooke Harris (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd

Twists and turns

This book has many twists and turns, ups and downs, both happy and sad. It kept my attention. Made it hard to put it down.

wonderful

The book was very emotional yet it provided a rainbow to the sadness. a wonderful read specially if your in need of some strength through a difficult time. its not a sad book its a real life and how to cope story. loved it!

Very well written

This is a story of a family that I think everybody can identify with. It certainly puts a point on gratitude and how we choose to look at our life’s circumstances. I very much enjoyed this book.

AWFUL!

I kept wanting to stop reading this. I try to avoid looking at car-crashes, too. Just when I thought it couldn't get worse, it would. So I seemed to be listening with a strange fascination; a lesson in how NOT to write.
Trite, maudlin, cliched...Harris even managed to get some lines in about the two lovers "completing" each other. This book is over-run with sentimentality. Not to mention adjectives, adverts, unoriginal metaphor and simile, and a general state of being over-wrought.
The dialogue is stiff and forced, and unrealistic. People on their deathbeds giving deep and dramatic advice and "wisdom."
Harris can show, but invariably ruins it with further additions where she tells it.
She ended it at least five times, before finally ENDING it. It was agonizing.
Why? I don't know. I don't usually waste my time like this. And this is the first review I've bothered to write. I have hundreds of audible books, and many of them are written by amazing wordsmiths and storytellers.
This is one for the compost heap.The two main Female characters are pathetic, in the face of severe abuse, seemingly having decided to just take it forever.
I cannot understand how this got into the "literary" batch this week. It is not, in any way, literary.
I highly recommend giving this one a miss.