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Summary
Summary
In one moment, two lives will be changed forever ... and forever ... and forever.
The one thing that's certain is that they met on a Cambridge street by chance and felt a connection that would last a lifetime. But as for what happened next ... They fell wildly in love or went their separate ways. They kissed or they thought better of it. They married soon after or were together for a few weeks before splitting up. They grew distracted and disappointed with their daily lives together or found solace together only after hard years spent apart.
With The Versions of Us , Laura Barnett has created a world as magical and affecting as those that captivated readers in One Day and Life after Life. It is a tale of possibilities and consequences that rings across the shifting decades, from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and on to the present, showing how even the smallest choices can define the course of our lives.
Author Notes
Laura Barnett is a writer, journalist and theatre critic. She has been on staff at the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, and is now a freelance arts journalist and features writer, working for the Guardian, the Observer and Time Out, as well as several other national newspapers and magazines. She was born in 1982 in south London. She studied Spanish and Italian at Cambridge University, and newspaper journalism at City University, London. Her first non-fiction book, Advice from the Players - a compendium of advice for actors - is published by Nick Hern Books. Laura has previously published short stories, for which she has won several awards. The Versions of Us is her first novel.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
British journalist Barnett's debut novel imagines the delicious prospect of romantic do-overs, cleverly negotiating the tricky and often dizzying terrain of three versions of first love. Eva and Jim first cross paths in 1958, and in "Version One," aspiring writer Eva's bike runs over a nail and law student Jim fixes it, with the pair falling instantly in love and marrying. In "Version Two," Eva's bike misses the nail, and she marries her actor boyfriend, David. "Version Three" starts similarly to the first version, but this time, Eva leaves Jim when she discovers she's pregnant with David's child. The stories and careers variously unfold across 50 years-the "Version Two" Eva and Jim finally meet in 1963 in New York-with parents aging, children growing up and moving on, spouses moving in and out, with Eva's writing and Jim's painting flourishing or withering depending on the version. The constants are love and death-and the portraits of Eva that Jim has drawn. In the first version, Eva views the one portrait as a "version of her. His version, or the version she once offered him." In the second version, a 1977 triptych depicts "three couples. Three lives. Three possible versions," a reminder of Jim's declaration that "you were there with me all along." In the third version, the painting feels like something Jim had long ago forgotten. Barnett's evocative presentation is a masterly romantic study of love's choices and consequences, leaving wide open just what constitutes a perfect ending. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand, Union Literary. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
In her first novel, Barnett speculates about the effect choice and chance have on fate by imagining three distinct lives for Eva Edelstein and Jim Taylor. All three versions of their story begin in 1958, when Eva, who wants to be a writer, and Jim, who dreams of being an artist, are students at Cambridge. In Version One, Jim stops to offer assistance when Eva's bicycle tire goes flat, and a few years later, they marry. In Version Two, their Cambridge meeting never takes place, and except for a few chance encounters, their tracks don't converge until late in life. In Version Three, Eva is already pregnant when Jim helps her with her tire, and though they fall in love, she leaves him to marry the father of her child. The narrative shuffles through shifting relationships, different sets of children, different degrees of professional success, different joys and disappointments. An intriguing exploration of the many roads not taken, though readers may feel they need a spreadsheet to keep track of who, what, where, and why in each version.--Quinn, Mary Ellen Copyright 2016 Booklist
Guardian Review
This Sliding Doors-style romantic drama riffs on the chance encounters that can define a life Every couple has their "what might have been". As a child I can still remember the dramatic thrill of my own potential nonexistence -- my parents broke up as teenagers then ran into each other on the street years later. I met my husband on a holiday outing following a chance encounter on a Miami beach. Every one of us has many, many roads not taken. And we know deep down how many unions are formed by good timing and suitability rather than random lightning bolts -- otherwise, it would be statistically astonishing just how many people fall in love at the age of 28, at the same time as all their friends. Meanwhile, the appeal of wondering how life might have turned out had you stuck with somebody else can be seen in the astonishing numbers of Facebook citations in divorce petitions. All of the above goes towards making this novel so much fun. The Versions of Us could be described as Sliding Doors, except with three stories instead of two; Life After Life, without all the messy deaths; or The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, without (slightly disappointingly) a big fire-breathing dragon. In version one, Eva and Jim meet and fall in love at university in the 1950s; in version two, they just miss one another; and in version three, it all goes horribly wrong. It is an alternate universe romance: a book of missed chances, as the characters wind in and out of each other's lives in a variety of ways. It is indisputably a novel that demands to be read physically rather than in e-reader form. You'll want to skip forward to follow each individual strand (a handy trick is to remember the first baby if you can). At its best, the novel is reminiscent of Elizabeth Jane Howard 's glorious Cazalet Chronicles, with the same casual metropolitan wealth and romantic intrigues. It may be a little careless around the edges -- could you really park a child in front of the television all day in 1966? Would Eva have had a word processor at home in 1977? -- while supporting characters such as Penelope, Eva's best friend, or Miriam, her saintly mother, are not so much sketchy as parsimonious ink dots. But the twists and turns of the central characters will keep you engrossed, the novel is very readable, and I thoroughly enjoyed the portrayal of the heroine Eva, an introverted, self-contained woman one cannot help liking. The appeal of Jim, apart from his purply eyes, was rather harder to spot, while pretty, selfish David, Eva's occasional alternate life partner, is far more fun: I could have done with rather more of him. While the book is not as gut-wrenching as David Nicholls's One Day, it is an unusual and lovely thing to watch an entire romance develop across a novel, not just the fun early bits, or unpleasant midlife startings-over, or male midlife crises disguised as literary novels. Its very scope is a joy, the technical achievement seamlessly done, and the ending -- all the endings -- suitably affecting, regardless of how winding the route one takes to get there. Your patience will be rewarded in more ways than one. * Resistance Is Futile by Jenny T Colgan is published by Orbit. To order The Versions of Us for [pound]9.99 (RRP [pound]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Jenny Colgan.
Kirkus Review
The multiverse migrates out of science fiction for a fling with romance. Eva Edelstein, biking to class in 1958 at Cambridge, runs over a rusty nail. A tall, blue-eyed student, Jim Taylor, offers to fix her tire. In version one, she accepts his help and eventually marries him. In version two, she is muddled and marries a less-likely beau. In version three, Eva marries the same lesser bloke but makes a course correction midbook. In bite-sized alternating chapters, Eva's and Jim's lives spin along, apart and intersecting, together and fraying, over the next 56 years. Newcomer Barnett labels each chapter installment as version one, two, or three. This triple-braided structure builds poignancy, as the same 30th birthday party or funeral, populated by the same characters, unspools into different outcomes. So Eva is "plumping cushions" while Jim's lover Helena is "cleaning, tidying" in parallel but different stories as Jim paints a triptych he calls The Versions of Us. Children arrive, toddle, grow into sullen adolescence, and launch families of their own. Careers founder or flourish; infidelities are pursued. Pot is inhaled throughout the 1960s; tobacco is smoked to the end. In every era, cats are petted under their chins, and vats of alcohol swilled. Secondary charactersEva's best friend, Penelope; Jim's art dealer, Stephenare barely inhabited devices. Barnett, a British journalist writing her first novel about British journalist Eva trying to write her first novel, has a weakness for clichs and clunkers, such as "Do you see how beautiful we are?" Beauty is not enough, of course. Those readers particularly fond of the one-true-love trope will overlook what cloys. Others will long for the superior sentences and searing London Blitz scenes in Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, a much better multiverse novel. Still, this debut work, like three snowballs running downhill, gathers the old-fashioned Newtonian momentum of a good yarn. We see the consequences of small choices echoing through the years. Fans of the novel One Day and the movie Sliding Doors will want to pick up this debut. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Taking a leaf from Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, this touching novel looks at three different ways the lifelong romance between artist Jim Taylor and writer Eva Edelstein might have turned out. It begins with a chance meeting at Cambridge University in 1958 and then follows the pair over the years until the present. Jim and Eva marry, or maybe Eva marries the vain actor David Katz. Through the decades, they have various relationships that are both troubled and happy, bear a number of children, and endure plenty of family drama in England, Italy, France, and California. This clever and imaginative novel with intriguing characters presents three equally engaging stories. Yet switching among the three versions can become so confusing that readers may wish for a genealogy chart to keep everyone straight. VERDICT Reading this ambitious first novel is like putting together the pieces of a complex puzzle. The challenge pays off-only when the puzzle is complete can readers see the whole panoramic picture. [See Prepub Alert, 11/9/15.]-Leslie -Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1938 This is how it begins. A woman stands on a station platform, a suitcase in her right hand, in her left a yellow handkerchief, with which she is dabbing at her face. The bluish skin around her eyes is wet, and the coal-smoke catches in her throat. There is nobody to wave her off--she forbade them from coming, though her mother wept, as she herself is doing now--and yet still she stands on tiptoe to peer over the milling hats and fox furs. Perhaps Anton, tired of their mother's tears, relented, lifted her down the long flights of stairs in her bath chair, dressed her hands in mittens. But there is no Anton, no Mama. The concourse is crowded with strangers. Miriam steps onto the train, stands blinking in the dim light of the corridor. A man with a black moustache and a violin case looks from her face to the great swelling dome of her stomach. 'Where is your husband?' he asks. 'In England.' The man regards her, his head cocked, like a bird's. Then he leans forward, takes up her suitcase in his free hand. She opens her mouth to protest, but he is already walking ahead. 'There is a spare seat in my compartment.' All through the long journey west, they talk. He offers her herring and pickles from a damp paper bag, and Miriam takes them, though she loathes herring, because it is almost a day since she last ate. She never says aloud that there is no husband in England, but he knows. When the train shudders to a halt on the border and the guards order all passengers to disembark, Jakob keeps her close to him as they stand shivering, snowmelt softening the loose soles of her shoes. 'Your wife?' the guard says to Jakob as he reaches for her papers. Jakob nods. Six months later, on a clear, bright day in Margate, the baby sleeping in the plump, upholstered arms of the rabbi's wife, that is what Miriam becomes. * * * It also begins here. Another woman stands in a garden, among roses, rubbing the small of her back. She wears a long blue painter's smock, her husband's. He is painting now, indoors, while she moves her other hand to the great swelling dome of her stomach. There was a movement, a quickening, but it has passed. A trug, half filled with cut flowers, lies on the ground by her feet. She takes a deep breath, drawing in the crisp apple smell of clipped grass--she hacked at the lawn earlier, in the cool of the morning, with the pruning shears. She must keep busy: she has a horror of staying still, of allowing the blankness to roll over her like a sheet. It is so soft, so comforting. She is afraid she will fall asleep beneath it, and the baby will fall with her. Vivian bends to retrieve the trug. As she does so, she feels something rip and tear. She stumbles, lets out a cry. Lewis does not hear her: he plays music while he's working. Chopin mostly, Wagner sometimes, when his colours are taking a darker turn. She is on the ground, the trug upended next to her, roses strewn across the paving, red and pink, their petals crushed and browning, exuding their sickly perfume. The pain comes again and Vivian gasps; then she remembers her neighbour, Mrs Dawes, and calls out her name. In a moment, Mrs Dawes is grasping Vivian's shoulders with her capable hands, lifting her to the bench by the door, in the shade. She sends the grocer's boy, standing fish-mouthed at the front gate, scuttling off to fetch the doctor, while she runs upstairs to find Mr Taylor--such an odd little man, with his pot-belly and snub gnome's nose: not at all how she'd thought an artist would look. But sweet with it. Charming. Vivian knows nothing but the waves of pain, the sudden coolness of bed sheets on her skin, the elasticity of minutes and hours, stretching out beyond limit until the doctor says, 'Your son. Here is your son.' Then she looks down and sees him, recognises him, winking up at her with an old man's knowing eyes. Part I VERSION ONE Cambridge, October 1958 Later, Eva will think, If it hadn't been for that rusty nail, Jim and I would never have met. The thought will slip into her mind, fully formed, with a force that will snatch her breath. She'll lie still, watching the light slide around the curtains, considering the precise angle of her tyre on the rutted grass; the nail itself, old and crooked; the small dog, snouting the verge, failing to heed the sound of gear and tyre. She had swerved to miss him, and her tyre had met the rusty nail. How easy--how much more probable --would it have been for none of these things to happen? But that will be later, when her life before Jim will already seem soundless, drained of colour, as if it had hardly been a life at all. Now, at the moment of impact, there is only a faint tearing sound, and a soft exhalation of air. 'Damn,' Eva says. She presses down on the pedals, but her front tyre is jittering like a nervous horse. She brakes, dismounts, kneels to make her diagnosis. The little dog hovers penitently at a distance, barks as if in apology, then scuttles off after its owner--who is, by now, a good deal ahead, a departing figure in a beige trench coat. There is the nail, lodged above a jagged rip, at least two inches long. Eva presses the lips of the tear and air emerges in a hoarse wheeze. The tyre's already almost flat: she'll have to walk the bicycle back to college, and she's already late for supervision. Professor Farley will assume she hasn't done her essay on the Four Quartets , when actually it has kept her up for two full nights--it's in her satchel now, neatly copied, five pages long, excluding footnotes. She is rather proud of it, was looking forward to reading it aloud, watching old Farley from the corner of her eye as he leaned forward, twitching his eyebrows in the way he does when something really interests him. ' Scheiße ,' Eva says: in a situation of this gravity, only German seems to do. 'Are you all right there?' She is still kneeling, the bicycle weighing heavily against her side. She examines the nail, wonders whether it would do more harm than good to take it out. She doesn't look up. 'Fine, thanks. It's just a puncture.' The passer-by, whoever he is, is silent. She assumes he has walked on, but then his shadow--the silhouette of a man, hatless, reaching into his jacket pocket--begins to shift across the grass towards her. 'Do let me help. I have a kit here.' She looks up now. The sun is dipping behind a row of trees--just a few weeks into Michaelmas term and already the days are shortening--and the light is behind him, darkening his face. His shadow, now attached to feet in scuffed brown brogues, appears grossly tall, though the man seems of average height. Pale brown hair, in need of a cut; a Penguin paperback in his free hand. Eva can just make out the title on the spine, Brave New World , and she remembers, quite suddenly, an afternoon--a wintry Sunday; her mother making Vanillekipferl in the kitchen, the sound of her father's violin drifting up from the music room--when she had lost herself completely in Huxley's strange, frightening vision of the future. She lays the bicycle down carefully on its side, gets to her feet. 'That's very kind of you, but I'm afraid I've no idea how to use one. The porter's boy always fixes mine.' 'I'm sure.' His tone is light, but he's frowning, searching the other pocket. 'I may have spoken too soon, I'm afraid. I've no idea where it is. So sorry. I usually have it with me.' Excerpted from The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
