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Title details for Five Days Left by Julie Lawson Timmer - Available

Five Days Left

by Julie Lawson Timmer
Kirby Heyborne
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
“A beautifully drawn study of what is at risk when you lose control of your own life.  Unique, gripping, and viscerally moving—this impressive debut novel heralds the arrival of an extremely talented writer." —Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of The Storyteller and Lone Wolf
Destined to be a book club favorite, a heart-wrenching debut about two people who must decide how much they’re willing to sacrifice for love.
Mara Nichols is a successful lawyer, devoted wife, and adoptive mother who has received a life-shattering diagnosis. Scott Coffman, a middle school teacher, has been fostering an eight-year-old boy while the boy’s mother serves a jail sentence. Scott and Mara both have five days left until they must say good-bye to the ones they love the most.
 
Through their stories, Julie Lawson Timmer explores the individual limits of human endurance and the power of relationships, and shows that sometimes loving someone means holding on, and sometimes it means letting go.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 9, 2014

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780553544947
      • File size: 371982 KB
      • Duration: 12:54:57

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 28, 2014
      This starkly intimate epistolary novel that follows the diaries of two parents—one a dying mother, the other a foster dad—dissects the experiences of losing hope and finding strength. Mara, declining precipitously from Huntington’s disease, makes final preparations for adored adopted daughter Lakshmi, loving husband Tom, doting parents, and best friends Steph and Gina—all with the help of a lost-soul cabbie looking for redemption. Meanwhile, Scott has been an adoptive father for his inner-city foster son, Curtis, but Curtis’s biological mother will be released from prison in five days. Scott and his wife, Laurie, are preparing for the upcoming birth of a daughter but his life is thrown into chaos when a tragic turn of events forces him to choose between Curtis and the imagined peace of life without him. Timmell makes a powerful debut with these tautly drawn parallel dramas: Mara decides to cut short a decline she believes will destroy her family, and Scott risks his marriage to give Curtis a future.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      In this gut-wrenching story, narrators Rebecca Lowman and Kirby Heyborne deliver all the necessary emotion without slipping into melodrama. Two parallel stories feature Mara, who has end-stage Huntington's disease, and Scott, who is about to lose custody of his beloved foster child. As the plot brings the climax of these tragic situations ever nearer, Lowman and Heyborne fully differentiate all the characters. Wisely avoid sentimentality, they employ restraint and understatement while subtly building intensity. These portraits of emotional devastation offer valuable, if uncomfortable, insights. Listeners will find stepping away difficult. M.O.B.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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