Pearl

DEBUT Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, poet Hughes’s debut novel traverses the life of Marianne, the primary narrator. Marianne’s mother disappeared when she was eight, leaving Marianne’s father, Edward, to care for her and her younger brother in the small English village where they reside. Marianne’s reckoning with the loss of her mother is the fundamental driving force of this novel. As she herself matures and becomes a young mother, she gains insight into her mother’s mental health as well as her own. The medieval poem “Pearl,” discovered among her mother’s belongings, becomes a source of solace, though Marianne also finds comfort and relief in her budding art career. Hughes is at her best when tracing Marianne’s dreamy and vague memories of her mother as a young child. She is less successful tracing the turbulence of Marianne’s rebellious adolescent years.