Two writers have a claim on this listing; the byline acknowledges just one, and it picks the wrong one. The author field on the audiobook reads Mark Haddon, while the description underneath summarizes a novel about a cautious young researcher named Emma Roberts and then closes with a full biography of Anita Brookner: born in south London in 1928, art historian at the Courtauld until 1988, author of a first novel in 1981 and a twenty-fourth in 2009. Three of the five written responses discuss Brookner by name, and one of them quotes a passage from the book and credits it to Anita Brookner, Leaving Home. Buy accordingly.
A Passage Quoted, and Credited to Brookner
Emma Roberts travels to France to research seventeenth-century garden design and finds something more absorbing than her work: an unlikely friendship with Francoise Desnoyers, whose beautiful house she is welcomed into as a guest. What she also finds, and cannot quite ignore, are the tensions running between Francoise and her formidable mother, and between that mother and her other guests. London recedes. France grows more significant in every respect, until a horrifying episode ends the fascination and returns Emma to a duller, safer life and to the compromises she comes to accept.
Restraint is the whole technique. The horrifying episode is named and not dramatized; the compromises are stated and not lamented. The reader who filed four stars in March 2006 gets closest to why this works, conceding that the same novel does keep getting written while insisting the excellent writing always draws the reader in, and noting that the ending here is more satisfactory than usual. That is a precise compliment about a precise book.
Evidence about the authorship keeps accumulating as you read down the page. A reader who filed four stars in February 2016 opens with a long passage about living in the present, about time that was once squandered now being given over to the actual and the possible, and attributes it to Brookner and to this title directly. That is a quotation from the text, matched to a name, on a listing that credits somebody else entirely. Nothing in the record explains the discrepancy, and nobody should have to reverse-engineer it from the reviews.
Joanna David Takes On the Hardest Assignment
Five hours and thirty-three minutes is exactly right for this kind of novel, and shorter than most listeners expect literary fiction to run. The compression is not a summary problem; the book is genuinely small in scale, one woman, two countries, a handful of rooms, and an interior life doing all the moving. An evening and a half covers it, and the book benefits from being taken in something close to one continuous stretch, because the accumulation of small refusals is the plot.
Gardens supply the structure, and the seventeenth-century research is not decoration. Formal garden design is an art of controlling growth, of deciding what is permitted to flourish and where, and Emma studies it while living inside a household that operates on the same principle. The novel never says this out loud, which is precisely why it lands. Listeners who enjoy fiction that trusts them to notice a pattern without having it labeled will find a great deal here.
Joanna David has the hardest assignment a reader can be handed: a protagonist whose defining characteristic is what she declines to say. Nothing detonates in this book. The drama is a woman noticing something at a dinner table and choosing not to raise it, and a reader has to make that legible in real time, without a page's white space to let a silence sit. Add the household in France, its names and its cadences, and the recording is doing continuous quiet work.
The Formula Since Hotel du Lac
Sameness is the standing charge against this author, and the page's lowest grade makes it with real force. The reader who filed three stars in June 2007 argues that since the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac the formula has simply repeated: a lonely single woman living out a monastic bookish life in minute detail, page after page, making all the wrong sad choices, staying with the demanding mother, never leaving the family apartment, rejecting the suitor. Anyone who has read two of these novels will recognize the pattern. Anyone who has read none will not.
Dates on the page are the second problem. Two of the five written responses were filed in 2006 and 2007, roughly nine years before this recording appeared in November 2015, so they describe printed editions stacked under a single average of 3.7 across 122 ratings. A third response, from a reader who filed five stars in May 2016, says only that delivery was fast and the item was exactly what was needed, which is a verdict on a shipment rather than on a novel.
Shelving is the last thing to correct. The listing files this under biographies and memoirs with an art and literature tag, and it is neither: it is a short literary novel with an invented protagonist. Anybody browsing the memoir shelf for a life story will arrive at fiction, and anybody hunting for this novel on the fiction shelf may never find it at all.
Two Different Verdicts, the Listing and the Novel
Devotees of quiet English fiction about constrained lives are the natural audience, and they already know it. The reader who filed five stars in September 2016 needs only two lines, calling it a very enjoyable read and the story heartfelt, which is about as much as this novel asks anyone to say. Readers who love mid-century English novels of manners, the kind where a declined invitation counts as an event, will find the register immediately familiar, though this one runs colder than most.
Hold off if you want incident, if you need a protagonist who fights back, or if a novel that resolves through acceptance rather than change reads to you as a novel that does not resolve. Hold off too if the authorship confusion on the listing would nag at you throughout; that is a legitimate reason to wait for a corrected record.
What remains, once the metadata is set aside, is a controlled and rather severe little book about the cost of choosing safety, read at a length that respects its own scale. Judge the listing harshly. Judge the novel on its own terms.
Good to Know
Who actually wrote the book on this Leaving Home audiobook listing?
The author field names Mark Haddon. The description, though, summarizes a novel about Emma Roberts and then closes with a biography of Anita Brookner: her birth in 1928, her years at the Courtauld, her first novel in 1981 and her twenty-fourth in 2009. Nobody appends one author's life to another author's book by accident.
Does the audiobook work as an introduction to this author?
It works well, mostly because the commitment is small. Five and a half hours buys the characteristic restraint, the constrained heroine and the muted resolution in a single evening, which is a fair way to discover whether the register suits you before spending longer on a bigger book by the same hand.
Why is the average only 3.7 when most visible responses are positive?
Because 122 ratings sit behind only five written opinions, and the score describes a publishing history rather than an edition. Averages assembled that way record how a divisive body of work was received over two decades, which is a different question from whether this particular recording is worth your evening.
