Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason
Sorrow and Bliss, Meg Mason
5 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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Sorrow and Bliss
A Novel

Author: Meg Mason

Narrator: Emilia Fox

Unabridged: 10 hr 39 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 02/09/2021


Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction!""Brilliantly faceted and extremely funny. . . . While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know."" — Ann PatchettThe internationally bestselling sensation, a compulsively readable novel—spiky, sharp, intriguingly dark, and tender—that Emma Straub has named one of her favorite books of the yearMartha Friel just turned forty. Once, she worked at Vogue and planned to write a novel. Now, she creates internet content. She used to live in a pied-à-terre in Paris. Now she lives in a gated community in Oxford, the only person she knows without a PhD, a baby or both, in a house she hates but cannot bear to leave. But she must leave, now that her husband Patrick—the kind who cooks, throws her birthday parties, who loves her and has only ever wanted her to be happy—has just moved out.Because there’s something wrong with Martha, and has been for a long time. When she was seventeen, a little bomb went off in her brain and she was never the same. But countless doctors, endless therapy, every kind of drug later, she still doesn’t know what’s wrong, why she spends days unable to get out of bed or alienates both strangers and her loved ones with casually cruel remarks. And she has nowhere to go except her childhood home: a bohemian (dilapidated) townhouse in a romantic (rundown) part of London—to live with her mother, a minorly important sculptor (and major drinker) and her father, a famous poet (though unpublished) and try to survive without the devoted, potty-mouthed sister who made all the chaos bearable back then, and is now too busy or too fed up to deal with her. But maybe, by starting over, Martha will get to write a better ending for herself—and she’ll find out that she’s not quite finished after all.

About Meg Mason

Meg Mason is a journalist whose career began at the Financial Times and the Times of London. Her work has since appeared in Vogue, Elle, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sunday Times (UK), and the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts. Born in New Zealand, she now lives in Sydney, Australia, with her husband and two daughters. 


Reviews

Goodreads review by Barbara on December 30, 2021

What I enjoyed most about Meg Mason’s “Sorrow and Bliss” is that she portrayed mental illness in its complicated and realistic light. In “Sorrow and Bliss”, the main character, Martha, is a true queen of self-sabotaging. She possesses awareness though. She understands she’s messing up, and she knows......more

Goodreads review by emma on July 29, 2024

trying to sit at the cool kids table (reading a book i saw on instagram) this was often so upsetting as to be totally unreadable but it ended nicely. normally i don't like books like that but this was...fine. even if it took me approximately 11 tries to read it. bottom line: and we all lived happily ev......more

Goodreads review by PattyMacDotComma on February 17, 2021

5★ “But apparently I just exist in terms of my relationship to other people now . . . Days later, Ingrid . . . sent a photo of her hand, holding a Starbucks cup. Instead of asking her name, the person who took her order had just written LADY WITH PRAM.” Martha’s sister, Ingrid, is a new mother. Martha......more

Goodreads review by Shawn on April 12, 2023

LOVED IT big fan big big fan......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on October 15, 2022

To bardzo dojrzała i niewygodna powieść. Historia, w której depresja i niezadowolenie odgrywają główne role, bo praktycznie tylko z nich składa się główna bohaterka. Przeczytałam ją tak naprawdę na dwa razy. Po pierwszych 140 stronach nie chciało mi się do niej wracać i zostawiłam ją na 3 tygodnie.......more