The Last Kings of Sark: A Novel, by Rosa Rankin-Gee
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The Last Kings of Sark: A Novel, by Rosa Rankin-Gee
Best Ebook PDF The Last Kings of Sark: A Novel, by Rosa Rankin-Gee
"My name is Jude. And because of Law, Hey and the Obscure, they thought I was a boy."Jude is twenty-one when she flies in a private plane to Sark, a tiny carless Channel Island and the last place in Europe to abolish feudalism. She's been hired for the summer to tutor a rich local boy named Pip. But when Jude arrives, the family is unsettling. Pip is awkward, overly literal, and adamant he doesn't need a tutor, and upstairs, his enigmatic mother Esmé casts a shadow over the house.Enter Sofi: the family's holiday cook, a magnetic, mercurial Polish girl with appalling kitchen hygiene, who sings to herself and sleeps naked. When the father of the family goes away on business, Pip's science lessons are replaced by midday rosé and scallop-smuggling, and summer begins. Soon something powerful starts to touch the three together.But those strange, golden weeks on Sark can't last forever. Later, in Paris, Normandy and London, they find themselves looking for the moment that changed everything.Compelling, sensual, and lyrical, The Last Kings of Sark by Rosa Rankin-Gee is a tale of complicated love, only children and missed opportunities, from an extraordinary new writer.
The Last Kings of Sark: A Novel, by Rosa Rankin-Gee- Amazon Sales Rank: #2948905 in Books
- Published on: 2015-09-01
- Released on: 2015-09-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.95" h x .78" w x 5.05" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
From Booklist Jude was hired to be Pip’s summer tutor, but she ended up being so much more than that. She learned far more than she ever taught—how to climb a tree and flirt with Czech boys and drink wine straight from the bottle. Thrown together in shared employment on the tiny island of Sark, Jude and Sofi, the family’s cook, quickly bond as roommates and coconspirators. Pip’s lessons fall by the wayside as he and Sofi and Jude embark on a magical summer of exploring. Once the summer comes to an end, the three continue on their ways, both on paths they expected to travel and some that are entirely new. Even as their lives stretch further and further apart, memories of the summer they shared on Sark remain. Rankin-Gee’s tactile, mellifluous prose is on full display here, as the tiniest details help fully immerse readers in the otherworldly island setting. This enthralling debut full of deep, unshakable bonds, twists of fate, and the power of nostalgia will be an exciting find for fans of Elin Hilderbrand and Meg Wolitzer. --Stephanie Turza
Review
“A luminous, enchanting novel about friendship, loss, and love. Exquisitely written, beautifully told, THE LAST KINGS OF SARK is a world I won't soon forget.” ―Anton DiSclafani, New York Times bestselling author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls
“With THE LAST KINGS OF SARK, Rosa Rankin-Gee has woven an irresistible and heady spell of youth and summer, love and friendship. Her energetic prose and attention to sensual detail will keep you reading greedily until the last page and thinking about the characters long afterwards. What an enchanting debut.” ―Joanna Hershon, author of A Dual Inheritance and Swimming
“Rosa Rankin-Gee's The Last Kings of Sark is a cracklingly witty, earnestly heartbreaking novel about a young girl who is sent to be a tutor on a remote island as majestic and magical as Evelyn Waugh gone to Neverland. What begins as a reminiscence of a summer-to-remember, turns elegantly into a powerful story about what happens when you fall into a love that cannot be forgotten in three lifetimes.” ―Kristopher Jansma, author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
“Funny, vivid, bittersweet.” ―Ned Beauman, author of The Teleportation Accident
“Rosa Rankin-Gee is a sophisticated stylist and her prose feels sharp and sleek. This is a book full of friendship and adventure and love and pigeons which fly out from pineapples. Like every great novel, it has magic at its core. It feels very modern too, like it has been written by a writer of a new time. Rankin-Gee is a writer we will all want to read again and again.” ―Monique Roffey, author of The White Woman on the Green and Archipelago
“A stunningly well-written first novel.” ―The Times, UK
“Lithe, shimmering novel. . . ends explosively, but also with extreme tenderness, an unforgettable finale.” ―The Guardian, UK
“The past and present join together in a tale of a summer love that weaves its tendrils around three young hearts and still grows there decades later . . . create[s] vital characters and paint[s] wonderfully with words . . . interesting and thought-provoking.” ―Kirkus
“Rankin-Gee's prose moves with a languid pace that vividly showcases Sark's – as well as her characters' – peculiarities . . . hidden surprises and a beautifully written, bittersweet ending pack a vivid emotional punch.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Exploration of sexual identity and upended expectations . . . sure to send readers into contemplation of loves long gone and left more appreciative of them. As in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, the narrator's awareness of storytelling conventions create opportunities to reflect on how memories form, and fans of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife will enjoy the ebb and flow of time. Debut author Rankin-Gee's keen insights into romantic negotiations belie her youth. The confident narrative will be a shot in the arm for bored book club planners, and the fluid sexuality will be a welcome (if overdue) offering for readers of LGBT fiction.” ―Library Journal, starred review
“Rankin-Gee's tactile, mellifluous prose is on full display here, as the tiniest details help fully immerse readers in the otherworldly island setting . . . full of deep, unshakable bonds, twists of fate, and the power of nostalgia.” ―Booklist
“Freshly innocent and self-assured - each word seems chosen with extreme care.” ―New Yorker
About the Author ROSA RANKIN-GEE grew up in Kensal Rise, London, but now lives by the Parc de Belleville in Paris. She's been named one of Esquire magazine's 75 Brilliant Young Brits', and in 2011, she won Shakespeare & Company's international Paris Literary Prize. Rosa runs a night-bird version of a Book Club, where up to 300 people come to swap books and drink cocktails in the former home of George Bizet. Her work has been profiled in the New York Times and The New Yorker among others.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with? By Keris Nine Rosa Rankin-Gee's debut takes a curious approach to structure and content that makes it feel like something less than a conventional novel, but something more than a series of connected short stories. This however is less in the spirit of experimentation with the format as much as meeting and matching the rhythms of the lives of the three young people who meet on summer in Sark and fall in love. Three people is an odd number for any love affair, and yes, inevitably, it leads to deep complications for all concerned.The novel is divided into two distinct sections. The first half is novella-like, related from the perspective of Jude, a young 21-year old girl who is engaged for the summer as a tutor for Pip on the island of Sark. Her time there seems fairly uneventful and even commonplace, Jude seemingly never fitting in or feeling entirely comfortable with Pip or sharing a room with Sofi, a young Polish girl from Ealing who is engaged there as a cook. They go for walks, cycle, go swimming and meet some Czech boys staying on the island, but nothing apparently out of the ordinary. There's little sense even of a narrative direction, just a series of impressions that somehow manage to get it across that Jude is nonetheless experiencing a summer of love that is going to have an important impact on her life.There's little that is made explicit about these feelings until close to the end of this section, but in the playfulness of the dialogue and the imaginative and original use of language (particularly from Sofi), you sense the deeper undercurrents at work. The second half of the book feels less satisfactory, revisiting Pip, Jude and Sofi at different times in the subsequent ten years or so through a series of fragmentary short-stories where you have to gradually work out from the dialogue who we are dealing with, what the time period is and in what circumstances the characters are living ...or, well, maybe coping is a better word. It feels like the author is playing with you, withholding information until the last moment, but on the other hand, this sense of being lost in the middle of something unknown does create exactly the right kind of sense of dissatisfaction that is vital here.This then, more than anything, is what the novel best achieves, communicating those feelings to the viewer outside of a conventional narrative plot. "A tugging at the base of your stomach" is one phrase that is used in the book to describe the sensation of being in love with the wrong person, of love being unrequited, of opportunities being missed, of regretful longing for the past, and it's a feeling that will be painfully recognisable to most readers. Rosa Rankin-Gee manages to hit the reader right in that delicate place through her writing across the whole of The Last Kings of Sark, and gut reaction is really what counts in this lovely little novel.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Delicate and Haunting By Louis N. Gruber Jude, a naive girl of twenty-one, is hired by a rich family one summer to act as a tutor for their son, Pip. There she meets Sofi, a young Polish girl who is acting as the cook that summer. The locale is the island called Sark--not exactly a part of England or even of the European Union, it's a sort of otherworldly place for an other-worldly summer. The three of them interact awkwardly, forming an odd but powerful friendship, a friendship that will change them forever. That's the first half of the novel: in the second half we follow the threesome as they trace their separate paths through life, love, and change.There's not much to say about the plot. It's a delicate and haunting evocation of mood, memory, and the flowering of feelings. The characters are striking, a little odd, young people who never quite fit in anywhere, never know really what to make of their unlikely relationship. That's all I can tell you. You just have to read it.Author Rosa Rankin-Gee writes delicate, luminous prose that evokes the complexity of feelings, without ever saying too much. She tells us just enough about Sark to make us want to know more, and just enough about her characters to make us wish them well. If you're looking for a snappy ending and all the loose ends tied up, you won't find that here. It's more impressionistic than that. Still, I enjoyed this book immensely and recommend it highly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful. Weak By A. Luciano The summer after she graduates from college, Jude takes a job on a remote island as a tutor for a rich high-school boy. There she finds that the boy, Pip, doesn't need much help. He is bookish and bright, doing the best he can to cope with his brash and overbearing father and his reclusive, possibly alcoholic mother. Much of Jude's time, then, ends up spent with the other young person at the house. Sofi is the cook, and she's a fearless and energetic presence. She's always up for an adventure, and brings a sense of fun to Jude and Pip.All too soon, Jude's summer job ends and she leaves the other two with promises to stay in touch, to get back together, to have another adventure. Life is complicated, though, and all three youths find the magic of the summer is difficult to replicate.The idea of this book is a solid one. I like the idea of a grand life-changing summer, in which characters grow in some way, discover something essential about themselves, and how that would affect their entire future. I don't feel as though this book got there, though. Jude wasn't a strong enough or likable enough character. I couldn't understand why she would have applied for the summer job to begin with, as she seemed uninterested in teaching Pip, or even interacting with him much. Jude became obsessed with Sofi, but didn't seem to bring much to the relationship.The angst in the later meetings between the characters didn't grab me, as I didn't see the characters as connected enough in the first place to merit the awkwardness of their later meetings.
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