Pearl by Siân Hughes (2023): A Review

Title: Pearl

Author: Siân Hughes

Publication Year: 2023

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Pages: 220

Source: audiobook @storytel.tr

Genre: literary fiction, coming-of-age

Awards: Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist (2023)

Pearl, inspired by the medieval poem of the same name, is a quiet, haunting, and deeply affecting story about Marianne, whose mother leaves the house one day and never returns.

Marianne narrates her loss, grief, guilt, and trauma through two distinct voices. One belongs to the Marianne of the past, who experiences abandonment and sorrow as a child; the other belongs to the Marianne of the present, who reflects on those events with the weight of memory and understanding. This dual perspective is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Through it, we encounter both the raw innocence of a child trying to make sense of the unbearable and the adult who is still living with the consequences of that absence. Marianne’s childhood world is so sorrowful and fragile that at times you simply want to step into the story, hold her, and tell her she will be all right, even though you know the odds are low.

For years, Marianne and those around her search for an explanation. Why did her mother leave without a note? Was she suicidal, or was something else at work? Does mental illness run through the family, and will Marianne one day repeat her mother’s disappearance, leaving her own child behind? Between these questions, the novel unfolds the story of Marianne’s life: her relationship with her father, her damaging relationship with Emily, and her uneasy place in the wider world.

What I admired most was how Marianne’s narration gradually suspended my impulse to judge either her or her mother. Instead, the novel asks the reader simply to listen: to their pain, their silences, their choices, and the emotional inheritance they carry. It is a book less interested in easy answers than in the complicated, often unresolved nature of grief and trauma.

I also loved the nursery rhymes that open each chapter. They give the novel the faint atmosphere of a children’s book or a folk tale, which fits beautifully with Marianne’s childhood voice. Yet the rhymes themselves are dark — sometimes unsettlingly so. While listening to the audiobook, I found myself wondering about the connection between each rhyme and the chapter that followed.

I want to keep this brief, though I could easily write much more about this book. Pearl reminded me of the work of Claire Keegan and Colm Tóibín, especially in its restraint and its careful treatment of grief, trauma, and guilt. If you admire Keegan or Tóibín’s quiet, emotionally precise fiction, this is a novel you may appreciate too.