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Gravity is the Thing

Audiobook
56 of 56 copies available
56 of 56 copies available
Abigail Sorensen has spent her life trying to unwrap the events of 1990. It was the year she started receiving random chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the post. It was also the year Robert, her brother, disappeared on the eve of her sixteenth birthday. She believes the absurdity of The Guidebook and the mystery of her brother's disappearance must be connected. Now thirty-five, owner of The Happiness Café and mother of four-year-old Oscar, Abigail has been invited to learn the truth behind The Guidebook at an all-expenses-paid retreat. What she finds will be unexpected, life-affirming, and heartbreaking.
"Astonishingly wonderful and magical and moving and uplifting and DIFFERENT" MARIAN KEYES
"A brilliant, beautiful, hilarious, heart-breaking, extraordinary book. I say this without bias, only awe." LIANE MORIARTY
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      In a smart-alecky tone mixed with genuine heart, narrator Aimee Horne nails the character of Abigail Sorenson. Abigail is a single mother in her mid-30s running a caf� in Sydney after leaving her law practice. She is a satirical and sharp observer of the absurd with a witty turn of phrase, but she also holds her losses close--a cheating husband and the unsolved disappearance of her brother when they were both teenagers. This audiobook mix of the quirky and the tragic holds together partly due to the terrific talents of Horne. Her Australian accent is charming, her snappy delivery perfect and often hilarious, her emotional depth and empathy completely authentic, and her timing terrific--her pace noticeably quickens as Abigail's son faces a medical emergency. A.B. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 13, 2019
      This tender and frank adult debut by YA novelist Moriarty (The Year of Secret Assignments) follows one woman’s search for happiness in a world as brimming with promises of healing as it is overflowing with letdowns. On her 16th birthday, Abi Sorenson’s beloved brother went missing. On the very same day, she received the first chapter of a mysterious self-help book titled The Guidebook in the mail, and received chapters intermittently through the years—the chapters cover everything from the death of metaphysics (in a single paragraph) to winking criticism of Keats to more traditional self-help metaphors. Now 36 with a young son, and 20 years into the lessons of The Guidebook—and still reeling from the unresolved circumstances of her brother’s disappearance, as well as grieving her ruined marriage—Abi is invited to a remote island to learn the truth about why these messages came to her. The course ultimately leads her back to her hometown and an opportunity to further explore the mysteries surrounding The Guidebook with others whose life it has haunted—which, she hopes, might somehow help her find her brother. With an eye as keen for human idiosyncrasies as Miranda July’s, and a sense of humor as bright and surprising as Maria Semple’s, this is a novel of pure velocity; it sucks the reader into Abi’s problems and her joys in equal, brilliant measure. A complex dissection of the self-help industry, as well as a complete and moving portrait of a difficult, delightful woman, Moriarty proves her adult novels can live up to her YA work’s reputation.

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  • English

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