Mourning Ruby and over 1.5 million other books are available for Amazon Kindle . Learn more

Buy New

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
Buy Used
Used - Very Good See details
Price: £1.49

or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
 
   
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Colour:
Image not available

 
Start reading Mourning Ruby on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

Mourning Ruby [Paperback]

Helen Dunmore
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
RRP: £7.99
Price: £5.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
You Save: £2.00 (25%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 2 left in stock (more on the way).
Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Gift-wrap available.
Want delivery by Monday, 20 May? Choose Express delivery at checkout. See Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition £6.49  
Hardcover --  
Paperback £5.99  
Audio, Cassette --  
Audio Download, Unabridged £13.57 or Free with Audible.co.uk 30-day free trial
Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. Learn more.

Book Description

27 May 2004

Mourning Ruby explores identity and maternal ties and is bestselling author Helen Dunmore's eighth novel.

Rebecca was abandoned by her mother in a shoebox in the backyard of an Italian restaurant when she was two days old. Her life begins without history, in the dark outdoors. Who is she, where has she come from and what can she become? Thirty years later, married to Adam, she gives birth to Ruby, and to a new life for herself. But when sudden tragedy changed the course of that life for ever, and all the lives that touch hers, Rebecca is out in the world again, searching . . .

'Moments that bring the reader to tears . . . a fascinating - often brilliant - novel' The Times

'Bold and unusual . . . miraculously written, Dunmore's drama of loss and regeneration pieces together shattered lives' Daily Mail

'Emotionally restrained, beautifully observed' Daily Telegraph

Helen Dunmore has published eleven novels with Penguin: Zennor in Darkness , which won the McKitterick Prize; Burning Bright; A Spell of Winter, which won the Orange Prize; Talking to the Dead ; Your Blue-Eyed Boy; With Your Crooked Heart; The Siege, which was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002; Mourning Ruby; House of Orphan; Counting the Stars and The Betrayal, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. She is also a poet, children's novelist and short-story writer.


Frequently Bought Together

Mourning Ruby + House of Orphans + Burning Bright
Price For All Three: £18.72

Buy the selected items together
  • House of Orphans £5.99
  • Burning Bright £6.74

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Product details

  • Paperback: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (27 May 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0141015012
  • ISBN-13: 978-0141015019
  • Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2 x 19.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 381,393 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Product Description

Amazon Review

Described on its jacket as resembling "a Russian Doll", Helen Dunmore's Mourning Ruby is certainly more of an assemblage of interconnected tales than a full novel. It's a work that plays the old "stories within stories" game; there are quotes from poems (Mandelstam, Byron, Dickinson and some of Dunmore's own pieces) and folk songs and nearly the last third of the book is given over to shards of a novel in progress written by one of the characters. As in Talking to the Dead and With Your Crooked Heart, the main protagonists here--Rebecca, her husband Adam, and Joe, her old flatmate, a Stalin-obsessed writer--form another of Dunmore's intriguing sexual/sibling triangles.

As the title confirms though, it's the death of Rebecca and Adam's child, Ruby, in a road accident that dominates. In the depiction of this horrific incident, Dunmore at one point breaks into verse, crystallising in just a few sparse, stream of consciousness lines Rebecca's agony as, impotently, she watches the tragedy unfold: "She always stops at roads, she's never run into a road, but look how fast she's going Adam, she's too far ahead, the gap between them, stop Ruby, stop Ruby, stop Rubystop."

Rebecca's loss is even greater because she is herself a lost child, a foundling who was abandoned in a shoebox outside an Italian restaurant. But, if this is a book about the many permutations of loss, it is equally about creativity, artistic as well as biological. Through Rebecca's encounters with her boss, Mr Damiano, the former circus impresario turned hotelier, and Joe's "story", Dunmore salutes, through the very medium of fiction itself, the healing power of the imagination. --Travis Elborough --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Intensely emotional, fiercely intelligent. ("Publishers Weekly," starred review) Gorgeous...powerful...nuanced, extraordinary. ("Detroit Free-Press") A must-read. ("Harper's Bazaar")

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
She dodged into the yard with me in her arms, tucked up in a shoebox. Read the first page
Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Search inside this book:

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Not Her Best 19 Feb 2005
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Sometimes I love Helen Dunmore, especially Burning Bright, but I must say this isn't one of those times. Parts of it are wonderful, especially those concerning her boss Mr. Damiano. But the character of her friend Joe drags it down. He never becomes more than an artistic convention and the "book within a book," his novella, was, well, cringemakingly awful. If it had been at the beginning rather than the end of the book, I doubt if I'd have read the entire book.
Was this review helpful to you?
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking .... 11 Feb 2004
By JMcG
Format:Hardcover
The structure of this wonderful book is complex, but Dunmore's poetic prose flows so gracefully across the pages, that it quite simply takes you by the hand and leads you gently but surely through its rich layers of stories within stories within stories without putting a step wrong.

The main story is about a mother (herself an abandoned child) and father trying to deal with the death of their young daughter. The awful moment when Ruby races from one parent to another into the path of an oncoming car is heartstopping in its shocking finality. It reminded me of the equally shocking moment in Ian McKewn's 'A Child In Time', when a father, out shopping, suddenly realises that his child has disappeared. In both cases the reader is overwhelmed by the absence of this small person whose energy spilled onto the page only a moment ago, but now is gone. As that absence fills their lives, so it spreads its influence across the whole book and its cast of characters both 'real' and fictional - and while the layering of stories means that there are a large number of characters (and voices) in this book, I felt that I knew and cared for even the most minor of them.

Mourning Ruby is beautifully crafted and takes the reader on an emotional and searching journey. Although it is laced with grief it is also about hopes and dreams. This book is not, in the end, about death, its about the joy and pain of living.

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Startlingly beautiful 30 Dec 2003
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Helen Dunmore never fails to amaze with her unique skill of creating poetry out of prose - "Mourning Ruby" is one of the best books I have read all year, and there have been many!

There are several stories running through one main tale: that of a mother and father mourning their dead child. But theirs is not the only tale of loss and grief. Dunmore manages to make even the most minor of characters live and breathe, and the ending, surprisingly, is uplifting and positive; something you don't expect throughout the book. Read it once for the enjoyment of the story, then go back again and revel in the words, strung together like gems on a necklace.

Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?   Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars A Rich Patchwork of Stories
I'm a major Helen Dunmore fan, and this beautiful, subtle and thoughtful novel is one of my favourites. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Kate Hopkins
1.0 out of 5 stars Depressing
This is my first Helen Dunmore and I have to say it will be my last. I can't recall a more depressing and dull book. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Bunty
3.0 out of 5 stars Not Dunmore's best but still beautifully written
Dunmore certainly adds dark or disturbing elements to her novels and perhaps this why I enjoy her novels so much. Read more
Published 17 months ago by J. Willis
3.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre
Ruby, the only child of Rebecca and Adam, has been dead for several years. Adam is a neonatologist who works with dying babies, and despite living with Rebecca seems estranged from... Read more
Published on 12 May 2009 by Captain Pugwash
4.0 out of 5 stars Without Roots.
Helen Dunmore is a fine writer who draws deeply on that sense of isolation that many of us feel from time to time. Read more
Published on 14 Dec 2006 by Lisa Fuller
5.0 out of 5 stars heartbraking and brilliant
This is the first book I have read by Helen Dunmore. At first I was confused by the fragmented structure and couldn't see how each thread of the plot tied in with the others. Read more
Published on 5 Nov 2006 by lydia mayger
4.0 out of 5 stars Mourning Ruby
Despite being a huge fan of Helen Dunmore, I was slightly
perplexed by this novel. Despite the beautiful poetic style
of writing, the various strands did not appear to... Read more
Published on 19 Aug 2005 by Mrs. Jeann F. Howell
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and sad
This is the first novel of Dunmore's I have read, and I will certainly be reading more. The central concern of the book could have lent itself to sentimentality, but it is more... Read more
Published on 22 Jan 2005 by paperlady
5.0 out of 5 stars a read jewel
Helen Dunmore has a vivid mind in Mourning Ruby. A tale of love and loss, unrequited futures and relationships missing a beat. Read more
Published on 12 Oct 2003 by mfl
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums


Listmania!


Look for similar items by category


Feedback


Amazon.co.uk Privacy Statement Amazon.co.uk Delivery Information Amazon.co.uk Returns & Exchanges