Landscapes, Christine Lai
Landscapes, Christine Lai
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Landscapes

Author: Christine Lai

Narrator: Henrietta Meire

Unabridged: 7 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/26/2023

Categories: Fiction, Women


Synopsis

An entrancing and prismatic debut novel by Christine Lai, set in a near future fraught with ecological collapse, Landscapes brilliantly explores memory, empathy, preservation, and art as an instrument for recollection and renewal.

In the English countryside—decimated by heat and drought—Penelope archives what remains of an estate's once notable collection. As she catalogues the library's contents, she keeps a diary of her final months in the dilapidated country house that has been her home for two decades and a refuge for those who have been displaced by disasters. Out of necessity, Penelope and her partner, Aidan, have sold the house and its scheduled demolition marks the pressing deadline for completing the archive. But with it also comes the impending return of Aidan's brother, Julian, at whose hands Penelope suffered during a brief but violent relationship twenty-two years before. As Julian's visit looms, Penelope finds herself unable to suppress the past, and she clings to art as a means of understanding, of survival, and of reckoning.

Recalling the works of Rachel Cusk and Kazuo Ishiguro, Landscapes is an elegiac and spellbinding blend of narrative, essay, and diary that reinvents the pastoral and the country house novel for our age of catastrophe, and announces the arrival of an extraordinarily gifted new writer.

About Christine Lai

Christine Lai grew up in Canada and lived in England for six years during graduate studies. She holds a PhD in English literature from University College London. Landscapes was shortlisted for the inaugural Novel Prize, offered by New Directions Publishing, Fitzcarraldo Editions, and Giramondo. Christine currently lives in Vancouver.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul on May 16, 2024

Finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award Longlisted for the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize US & Canada The truth of any single thing, Celia said in response, requires time and continual return. Christine Lai's Landscapes is wonderful hybrid novel combining a story of ecolological collapse, the his......more

Goodreads review by Krista on February 08, 2024

A gong sounds. The butler announces that dinner is served. The group proceeds to the dining room. But the woman remains standing at the window. She looks at Poussin’s painting through its reflection in the glass, its colours slightly dulled. As she studies the scene of the abducted Sabine women s......more

Goodreads review by Geoffrey on August 02, 2023

A really special book that I found both profoundly sad and ultimately therapeutic - richly steeped in the poetic details of lost objects, failing architecture, and ailing trees, canny in its observations of violence and the kinds of people who inflict it, trailblazing in its weaving of art criticism......more

Goodreads review by Lee on January 01, 2024

This engaged me the most on the level of art criticism, something I always love seeing worked into a novel. It successfully made a case for examining how violence against women is portrayed in the masterpieces and how we have been all to willing to accept when male figures in such works are painted......more

Goodreads review by Charlotte on January 19, 2025

Set in a near-future crumbling due to climate change and political upheaval, Landscapes follows an art expert and archivist named Penelope as she prepares to sell her husband’s family manor and reckons with memories of her rape as the rapist’s (her brother-in-law Julian) final visit to the manor slo......more