Expectation: The most razor-sharp and heartbreaking novel of the year

Product Information

This book does get compared to Sally Rooney’s books (Conversations with Friends and Normal People). I’m a big Sally Rooney fan and there is merit to that comparison. The writing style, tone, and pacing are similar in a way.

Expectation by Anna Hope review – intelligent and humane

Beautiful and unattached, Lissa is re-evaluating what it means to be an actress in her thirties. While she fiercely resists convention, she’s lonely. A chance encounter in the British Library with Nathan has her wondering if she missed her best chance at love when she introduced him to Hannah.

Let's start with the timeline in the blurb. It's supposed to be 'ten years later'. But Cate spends her early twenties in activism in Brighton. At thirty-three, she marries a man who impregnates her within three months of their meeting. Hannah is with her husband thirteen years by age of thirty-six. She appears to be thirty-six at the same time that Cate is thirty-three. Lissa is in a long-term relationship for about the same length of time. So Hope is saying that two women in their late twenties, who are both with partners about five or six years, move into a house-share instead? That can last - in the book's timeline - maybe one or two years, but this is their golden time? Lissa thinks) “there’s bugger all between thirty and fifty, not just in Chekhov, but in everything else. Perhaps in life. Perhaps this is it – Womanhood. The Wasteland Years.” Yes, there's bugger all between thirty and fifty, not just in Chekhov, but in everything else. Perhaps in life. Perhaps this is it - Womanhood. The Wasteland Years."

Expectation - Penguin Books UK

Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question: what does it take to lead a meaningful life? The most razor-sharp and heartbreaking novel of the year, EXPECTATION is a novel about finding your way: as a mother, a daughter, a wife, a rebel. Cate, the only one of the three who is a mother is drowning in her new role-expected by everyone to be doing better at it than she is, she is absolutely struggling with her son. Her husband and mother in law expect more of her than she can give to motherhood, she feels she has lost herself in this-no one has told her that this is a natural way to feel so she sleepwalks through the days. Instead.... sexual energy was passed between them. Seems Nathan was the one who did the influencing— Der Originaltitel von "Was wir sind" lautet "Expectation" - und nichts könnte besser zu diesem Roman passen! Es geht nämlich genau darum: Um die Erwartungen, die wir selbst, unsere Partner*innen, unsere Freund*innen, unsere Mitmenschen, die Gesellschaft an uns stellen. Wir sind umgeben von Erwartungshaltungen, manche erfüllen wir, anderen werden wir nicht gerecht und können das auch gar nicht. Anna Hopes Roman, übersetzt von Eva Bonné, greift dieses Erwartungs-Motiv auf ganz eindringliche Weise auf, sie lässt uns Lesende ihren drei Protagonistinnen sehr, sehr nahe kommen und schafft Figuren, mit denen wir uns auf ganz unterschiedliche Weisen identifizieren können.Nathan reached a breaking point and told Hannah that he loved her but he just couldn’t do the IVF treatments any longer. Expectation by Anna Hope brings to vivid life that particular tension one feels just before middle age, when it begins to become clear that life won’t end up looking exactly the way we thought it would. The female friendships here are ones we’ll all recognize, and in seeing myself in each of these women – their good moments and their bad - I felt implicated in their stories, and in this book. It’s an outstanding novel." - Mary Beth Keane