The Sudden Appearance of Hope

By: Claire North

Narrated by: Gillian Burke

Length: 16 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

The World Fantasy Award-winning thriller about a girl no one can remember, from the acclaimed author of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and 84K.

My name is Hope Arden, and you won't know who I am. But we've met before—a thousand times.

It started when I was 16 years old. A father forgetting to drive me to school. A mother setting the table for three, not four. A friend who looks at me and sees a stranger.

No matter what I do, the words I say, the crimes I commit, you will never remember who I am.

That makes my life difficult. It also makes me dangerous.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope is a riveting and heartbreaking exploration of identity and existence, about a forgotten girl whose story will stay with you forever.

©2016 Claire North (P)2016 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"[Narrator] Gillian Burke's performance is unforgettable. It's smooth, polished, and oh so graceful.... Burke's performance is as addictive as the story itself." (AudioFile)

"Beautifully written, with a protagonist who is both tragic and heroic, the novel is remarkably powerful and deeply memorable, the latest in a string of terrific books from this newly emerged star in the genre-blending universe."—Booklist (starred review)

"The experience of sitting with it, sinking into it, aching along with Hope as her loneliness shapes and breaks her, was wonderful, painful and moving."—NPR

Another Claire North Mind-bender

The sudden appearance of anything written by this author's prodigious pen is cause for celebration and much to be desired.

The very existence of a person like the amazingly talented Catherine Webb (aka, Claire North) is enough to make any aspiring writer green with envy. Here she is, just scarcely into her thirties and already she has authored eighteen novels!--an average that exceeds one each year, starting from when her first one was completed at the age of fourteen. (Good god!) To say she is prolific does not do her justice. At this rate, she is in league with the likes of John Updike, who was well known for his staggering book-a-year pace. Now keep in mind that Webb also works full time as an accomplished lighting designer, And let's not even bother discussing her "hobbies" (exotic martial arts anyone? studying Mandarin??). Well...perhaps Ms. Webb really hails from Krypton and was delivered to planet Earth via a tiny spaceship in the mid-eighties. That would explain a lot and make all of us feel a little better in the process.

Anyway, I'm sure she really is from England as she claims. She certainly sounds British from the free Audible interview she gave on "The Sudden Appearance of Hope," posted back in April (and still available *hint*). In the interview, she discusses a bit of her writing method, which involves letting the novel reveal itself to her as she writes rather than knowing exactly what she will say ahead of time. She says she loves to write, and of this there can be no doubt. The beauty and artistry of her language is evident on every page. If you haven't discovered the rest of the Claire North series of novels, oh my God! I highly recommend them.

Her debut novel, "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" was nominated for several awards, including an Arthur C. Clark award. Her follow-up novel, "Touch," although not *quite* as fantastic, still is unbelievably fantastic and ranks among my favorites. Both are expertly narrated by the phenomenal Peter Kenny, who by the author's own admission (and to her delight) brought out aspects of these works via the strength of his interpretation that she had not been aware were present.

Kenny does not narrate this latest work; instead we are treated to the great Gillian Burke, whose voice is more-or-less a delicious, dripping honeycomb of presence and persona. She, I'm afraid, is another superwoman, and one wayward glance at her website will make you wonder what you, a mere mortal, have been doing with your life (certainly not herding llamas in the high Andes like her or deep-sea diving off of one of the four continents on which she has lived). While difficult to describe how exactly, Burke has managed to capture the Peter Kenny vibe for this novel, such that if one is used to the feel of the proceeding Claire North books, nothing askew will be detected.

Now, as for the book itself, the writing is as languid and vivid and as much Claire North as one could hope to find. As usual, a solitary protagonist speaks directly to you, hypno-pathically lulling you into her world; and as usual, the protagonist is "different" from most people, different in fact from anyone you could ever imagine meeting in your own non-Claire North world.

In "Harry August," our protagonist experiences life as an infinite temporal loop; in "Touch," he (or perhaps it's she) experiences it through an infinite set of inhabited lives; and now in "Hope," this new character exists in infinitely renewable moments. No record of her prior moments can ever be recorded because each one vanishes immediately from the memory of all who encounter her. It's a fascinating concept and continues what I am calling the Claire North tradition of blowing my tiny, little mind with her SciFi witchcraft.

As with her other books, a sinister antagonist of epic proportions opposes the proceedings here; and interestingly enough, as in the proceeding novels, a captivity motif persists. It is as if these otherwise unstoppable characters, no matter their amazing abilities, still face the same human potential for wickedness that haunts us all. But maybe I'm reading too much into it. Still, it doesn't take a PhD in Literature to detect an overriding theme involving the dehumanizing horror of celebrity culture, here, and that is fortunate since I lack such a credential.

I can say that at minimum what one will find in "The Sudden Appearance of Hope" is a superbly-written thriller designed to keep the reader guessing all the way to the last sentence. It's the sort of book you'll want to keep around in your library until, like the conceit of its central character, the very memory of it has faded just enough to make you forget it was ever there, so that one day you can have the pleasure of discovering it all over again.

Socio / techno thriller

Although sometimes I felt like the word count was being padded out by repetition and by technical descriptions I was still entranced by the story and its protagonist.

Made me think deeply about memory and identity

Who am I? If (when) I am no longer here, who will remember me?

A spy novel and a philosophical enquiry?

Wonderful?

Struggled to get through this

This book lashed in the beginning bit then started to get more interesting. And then lagged, and lagged, and... finally around Ch 70I didn't care about what happened anymore. I raced to the end, and was not rewarded. Better luck next time!

great story but not my favorite author.

The extemporaneous details get tiresome, boring, and hault what could be a great narrative. Maybe there was something lost between reading a physical book and the audiobook, but much of the time I found myself zoning out or skipping ahead to something interesting and meaningful to the story. The themes on lonliness never seemed to really strike me and the main character was cold and bitter and struggling with lonliness and isolation, but I never seemed to care. was that the point? Maybe I need a book club.....

Perfection

A perfect exemplification of the human concept of perfection vs being who you are. Hope is Perfect.

A Philosophical Novel Wrapped in a Good Story

Any additional comments?

Hope Arden has inside-out-amnesia. That is, while she can remember the world, the world forgets her. Her photographs remain, and she can leave a trace in documents and on the internet. But, if you have an interaction with her, you’ll forget her and your actions alongside her.

On the one hand, it gives her what one character insistently describes as the ultimate freedom, the endless capacity to reinvent herself. Without a past, without the capacity to leave a mark on the world around her, she can do things the rest of us could never imagine. She is, for instance, a superb thief. She can pick up an item in plain view, duck behind a corner for a few seconds, and walk back again, forgotten and unsuspected. She also proves to be an unparalleled investigator, someone who can interrogate a particular witness, get a piece of the story, and then come back a minute later to start the interrogation again using those new bits to leverage out harder to find ones.

More broadly, though, Hope experiences her condition as a curse. It hurts when her own parents forget her, at first selling her things because they don’t recognize them as hers and later losing all sense that they had a second child. And she has no capacity to fall in love, to form friendships, or to live in community. She is a constant newcomer, someone who, having no past as far as the world is concerned, effectively has no future. She is a perpetual observer rather than someone who is fully alive.

That premise is provocative in its own right, and “Claire North” (apparently it’s a pseudonym) is a gifted enough writer to sense what she has. Claire’s condition becomes a stepping-off point for reflecting on what it means to be human. Who are we if we cannot leave a lasting mark on the world around us? To what degree are we, or should we, be shaped by group and social pressures?

It takes a while for the central conflict to become fully clear – North is very skilled, here and in the even a little better The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and she shows her hand slowly – but Hope is both attracted to and horrified by a Scientology-like app call Perfection. The app works by encouraging consumers to make “healthy choices” – like eating well, working out, buying flattering clothes, and being seen with other out-to-be-perfect people – and it rewards its top-tier participants with “programming,” eventually revealed to be surgery that alters their personality.

The result of such engineering is a cadre of bland movie-star types, people whom the world seems to value but who appear to Hope (and to a couple other key characters) as soul-less. They have, in other words, forgotten their true selves in favor of the marketed, packaged identity of corporate America.

And there you have the central conflict of the novel: at one extreme a woman incapable of experiencing community and its pressures and, at the other, a process that amplifies a false sense of community over all other types of identity.

This is, in other words, a philosophical novel disguised as sci-fi/fantasy. Or maybe that’s what sci-fi/fantasy should always aspire to. It’s just rarely this good.

Further complicating the scenario here, Hope is a Black woman of Muslim descent. She is, after Ralph Ellison (who shows us how the Black man is, in some crucial ways, invisible in white America), or Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (who give us the Fantastic Four’s Invisible girl), or even a host of very contemporary political voices who insist that all Muslims are subsumed under the identity of their faith, just the type to be made invisible. As a consequence, North is after something not just philosophical but topical as well.

All those conflicts get subsumed within a story that is still a pretty good story. I’ve said enough already without getting into the other characters who, while not remembering Hope, do come to understand that she exists and develop relationships with her by leaving themselves notes about their interactions. Those characters develop different feelings about the nature of her invisibility and the potential for Perfection to perfect or destroy the world. And they work at cross purposes to safeguard or sabotage the app.

I do think this one could have worked just as well if it were a good shot shorter, but North writes so well that it’s hardly a complaint. I’m happy to be lost in her work and her worlds. She has the capacity, like no one else I can think of at this scale, to change one fundamental premise of human identity and then to measure the implications of that change with unwavering insight. I am very much looking forward to whatever she does next. She writes novels that ought to be written.

Gripping Plot- Fantastic Narration

I read this for book club. It's not something I would have normally picked but I quite enjoyed it. I found myself binging it and finishing a week early somehow. The narration is wonderful and really helps you get lost in the book.

This is a wonderful, touching story, narrated well

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I have already recommended it to friends, because Claire North writes beautifully and Gillian Burke is the perfect narrator for Hope.

What did you like best about this story?

I enjoyed the central conceit greatly, and the explorations and explanations for Hope's justification of her actions.

Which scene was your favorite?

I quite enjoyed the scene where Hope and Luca speak and argue in the cafe.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Hope's explanations of how she gets through life with her affliction towards the end of the book are thought-provoking and poignant.

Can be a bit slow

4 out of 5 stars for story pacing. 5 out of 5 stars for creativity. I keep expecting Claire North's new books to capture me the way her first Harry August book did. While a new and creative idea is offered here, it was only a good story and not one that I will continue to treasure like the above named book.