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    Expectation: A Novel
    Expectation: A Novel
    Expectation: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Expectation: A Novel

    Written by Anna Hope

    Narrated by Vinette Robinson

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    ""The female friendships here are ones we’ll all recognize, and in seeing myself in each of these women – their good moments and their bad - I felt implicated in their stories, and in this book. It’s an outstanding novel.”-- Mary Beth Keane, New York Times bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

    In this sharply observed novel set in and around London, three college friends, now in their thirties, must come to terms with the gap between the lives they imagined for themselves and reality in the face of marriage, fertility struggles, and loss.

    In her first year of motherhood after an unplanned pregnancy, Cate is constantly exhausted, spiraling into self-doubt and postpartum anxiety. Her husband Sam seems oblivious, but maybe she’d prefer he remain in the dark. How can she admit the unthinkable—that she misses her freedom?

    In contrast, Hannah continues to endure round after round of unsuccessful IVF treatments. The process is taking its toll on her physically and emotionally—and, she worries, creating distance between her and her husband Nathan. She is godmother to Cate’s son, but every time they get together, it’s a trigger.

    Beautiful and unattached, Lissa is re-evaluating what it means to be an actress in her thirties. While she fiercely resists convention, she’s also lonely. A chance encounter in the British Library with Nathan has her wondering if she missed her best chance at love when she introduced him to Hannah.

    As each woman longs for what the others seemingly possess, will their bonds of friendship sustain them in this liminal phase of their lives—or will their envy and desire tear them apart?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateApr 14, 2020
    ISBN9780062956095
    Author

    Anna Hope

    Anna Hope studied English at Oxford, attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and then received an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her first novel, Wake, was a finalist for the National Book Awards (UK) and the Historical Writers’ Association’s Debut Crown Award. She lives in London, UK.

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    Reviews for Expectation

    4/5

    76 ratings7 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I loved the story line and found it engrossing, but there were multiple times in the audiobook where the story went silent or jumped ahead (including the end so I have no idea how it finished!). I tried streaming, downloading, going back - it would just behave the same way. Pretty frustrating.
    • 2/5
      A long tale about nothing. I am very disappointed. :(
    • 5/5
      This tells the entwined stories of Cate, Lissa and Hannah mainly from their time as students until their late thirties. I enjoyed it very much. The characters were easy to keep separate in one's mind, although the continual shifting between different years was occasionally confusing. I found my loyalties switching from friend to friend, but at the same time rooting for each.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      I received a copy of this book for free from the publisher (Harper Perennial) in exchange for an honest review. This was an incredibly fascinating novel. First off, this novel is a slow burn. The book starts off on the slow side and then gradually gets more and more interesting as it progresses.The three women in this book are all very complicated and complex. I found them to be utterly riveting. They’re all morally grey which makes them feel more real and raw. Sometimes they make decisions that others may find irritating, but to me that makes they more dynamic. I liked the flashbacks that were woven throughout the book. They helped highlight different things about the women. The flashbacks also gradually introduced new information about them. There’s no information dumping in this book. Everything gets revealed at just the right time. This book does get compared to Sally Rooney’s books (Conversations with Friends and Normal People). I’m a big Sally Rooney fan and there is merit to that comparison. The writing style, tone, and pacing are similar in a way. Lastly, I liked the ending because it brought the book full circle, but at the the same time I didn’t like it. To me, the ending didn’t fully resolve everything I wanted to be resolved. Overall, this book is a compelling character study of three women coming to terms with how their lives turned out.
    • 2/5
      What this book is: a decent enough book about relationships from a female perspective: relationships with friends, relatives, partners and selves.

      What this book is not: feminist. Yeah, OK, it passes the Bechdel test. But that doesn’t make it feminist. It’s mostly just three women bobbing along without any kind of plan, while the narrative reinforces the idea that any woman approaching middle age must either have already had a baby, be absolutely desperate to have a baby, or hugely regretful for not having had a baby. Erm, no.

      I ought to be able to relate on some level to the characters - I’m of the same generation, but I have nothing in common with them. I thought I was reading a YA novel, written by a millennial, and was surprised to find it was by a fellow Gen-Xer. Perhaps Hope is trying to appeal to that younger audience that are finding themselves reflected in Sally Rooney’s books.

      I found the writing style a little confused. It moves from the staccato (“She does this. He looks there. It is raining”) to long, flowing sentences and back. The staccato jarred with me a little. And points were lost for the whole book (including flashbacks) being in present tense. Present tense in a novel annoys me.

      So, this could have scored a nice average 3 stars, but it’s flawed, so 2 stars it is.
    • 4/5
      Pretty good. Maybe a little predictable in parts - or is real life predictable at times? Characters seemed real and situations believable. Read more of Anna Hope?
    • 5/5
      I was a big fan of Anna Hope's first book, Wake, but have yet to catch up with The Ballroom. However, with Expectation she has cemented her position in the list of those authors whose books I would gladly pick up without knowing anything about them.This is a quiet novel. There are no seismic events, no murders, nothing out of the ordinary happens and yet it's full of human life. I say nothing out of the ordinary happens, but for the characters within the things that happen to them are far from ordinary.Those characters are Hannah, Cate and Lissa. Three friends, but Hannah is the one that links them all. She met Cate at school and Lissa at university and the three have bonded over the years. We follow them through the years with a look at pivotal times in their lives, and also 2010 when most of the story takes place. We see how their lives came together and then diverged, their careers, their relationships, their children, their parents.Put simply, this is a story about life. All those ups and downs, however small or large, and how they can affect everything else. It's about the weight of expectation versus the harsh realities of life.These women are about my age, those middle years when you can look back and learn from what's gone before, and have the rest to look forward to and hopefully make the best of, and I found a certain amount of empathy with them. Cate, the new mother, who is struggling to cope; Hannah, desperate for a baby; Lissa, a jobbing actress, barely making enough to cover her rent. I thought they were all incredibly well-drawn, fascinating yet normal people.It's hard to really put into words how immersive this book is. I read the last 200 pages in one sitting and just didn't want to leave it for a minute. I would say a certain amount of concentration is required at the beginning because the narrative jumps around a bit and I had to think carefully to pull the strands of each woman's life together, but then I became fully entrenched in their stories as if I knew them, knew their foibles, their likes, their dislikes, their feelings.This is the kind of book I love, a slice of life story full of heart and emotion. I did have a big lump in my throat as the end approached. Only an exceptional writer can write this sort of book and make it unputdownable. Anna Hope has achieved that for me.