The World Before Us
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  • Published: 28 March 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241970706
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $30.00

The World Before Us

How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

Formats & editions
Paperback
5 Jul 2022
EBook
1 Apr 2021
EBook
26 Mar 2015
Audiobook
25 Mar 2021
Audiobook
28 Jul 2016
Paperback
28 Mar 2016
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A haunting novel about trauma, loss, history and memory - set in a Victorian asylum and a quirky London museum

Jane was fifteen when her life changed for ever. In the woods surrounding a Yorkshire country house, she took her eyes off the little girl she was minding and the girl slipped into the trees - never to be seen again.

Now an adult, Jane is obsessed with another disappearance: that of a young woman who walked out of a Victorian lunatic asylum one day in 1877. As she pieces together moments in history, Jane uncovers a tangled story that has been buried for more than a century, and finally confronts her own past . . .
  • Published: 28 March 2016
  • ISBN: 9780241970706
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $30.00
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Praise for The World Before Us

Daring and mesmerizing. A haunting, irresistible story and an urgent mystery about what it means to pass through this life. Absorbing, luminous and powerfully human

Alison MacLeod, author of Unexploded

An original and intelligent novel about the past and its persistent power in the present

Sunday Times

Sensitive, melancholy, sharply observant. A work of great power

Guardian

Strange and absorbing . . . I relished this book

Penelope Lively, The New York Times Book Review

Beguiling, richly suggestive . . . a tantalising mystery

Metro

A complex, subtle, and utterly haunting meditation on memory, history, and mortality. This book is magnificent

Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

Publisher's description. Haunting and intricate, a tale of interlinking disappearances across history, where the present meets the past and old ghosts linger in the mind. A lost child, an escaped asylum inmate, a lonely young museum curator, and a centuries-old mystery waiting to be uncovered...

Penguin