Abbie Greaves’ novel, The Ends of the Earth, starts off by placing the reader at Ealing Broadway railway station in London. It’s evening and a woman is standing in a particular spot so she can see all the passengers alighting from the trains. People are used to her by now. After all, she’s been doing exactly the same thing for seven years. She’s decently dressed so she’s not begging. The unusual thing about her is that she’s holding up a sign that says: “Come Home Jim”.
Who is Jim and where is he?
Mary came home from a visit to her mother in Ireland one day to find that her boyfriend, Jim, had disappeared with no trace. Since then - no call, no postcard, no text. Nothing. No-one knows where he is, not even his parents, and the police eventually closed the missing persons case.
Seven years is a long time to wait at the same spot where Mary used to meet Jim when he came home from work. Mainly, people leave her alone but one evening, things get a bit chaotic when the train schedule goes awry and the station is crowded with commuters jostling each other. In the process, someone’s elbow digs into her ribs and – already in a state of upset - she screams out, swearing at him. Someone catches this on their cellphone, puts it on their social media and before long she is an internet sensation.
At the station at the same time, a journalist catches this hectic moment. Alice, who was on her way to interview a member of the station personnel, suddenly decides that this would be a stronger lead to follow. She needs to get a great front-page story as her editor has told her that if she fails, she will lose her job. So she develops a relationship with Mary but never tells her what her real job is.
This well-written and intriguing story jumps across time lines as we follow the lives of two women desperately searching for the whereabouts of the same man.
However, jumping backwards and forwards in time doesn’t really work for me. My suggestion to readers of this book is to pause a few seconds before you embark on a new chapter with an updated timeline … and let the latest development sink in! – Caroline Smart
The Ends of the Earth is published by PenguinRandomHouse UK. ISBN: 978-1-5291-2396-8
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