دانلود رمان انگلیسی “دختر ناپدید شده”

It’s hard to explain precisely why I decided to move back to the little village of Hareton Wick in Hampshire. The village is bounded on one side by the New Forest – that’s now a national park – and on the other by rolling arable farmland. It’s a pleasant, bucolic little spot. These days you can drive to Southampton in under an hour, but back in the mid-seventies, when I last lived here, the roads weren’t as good and my dad had to drive an hour and fifteen minutes each day to reach Southampton university where he worked. It’s funny to think I am so much older now than my parents were then. I have so many memories of that time. Some good, but not all of them. When people have asked me: Why move there? I’ve given various explanations. I’ve told them I like country living; that I want to be settled in a place where I’ll be happy to retire in a few years’ time. That I work from home, creating online training material, and can live anywhere, so why not pick a pretty village, and it might as well be one I already know? And it has the advantage of being close to Dad, in Southampton. He’s getting to that stage in life where he needs more support. Obviously supporting him is going to fall to me, the one who stayed in England. My brother David won’t do a thing, just like he didn’t when Mum needed care. David moved to Australia, and when I’m feeling uncharitable, I’m sure he did it to get out of needing to take any responsibility for our ageing parents. He escaped; I didn’t. And now I’m back where I started. I’m not one given to much self-analysis. But if I had to dig deep and work out exactly why, after nearly fifty years, I’ve actually moved back to the place where I spent my early childhood, it’s probably because this is where I was happiest, in that long, hot, last summer, before my world fell apart. And because, in an odd sort of way, it feels like there’s unfinished business for me in Hareton Wick. We left so suddenly when everything went wrong. There’s also, I should admit to myself at least, a more recent reason. Something I can’t put out of my mind. Something that caused a descent into the bottle, from which it’s been a long haul out. Something that my subconscious is associating with this place, with what happened just before we moved away. At least that’s what my therapist suggested. The upshot of it all is that I ended up moving back here last week, buying myself a two-bed bungalow in an estate which didn’t exist back in 1976. It would have been too weird by far to move to our old estate or the street where my old best friend, Lynne, had lived. She’d messaged me, in reply to the change of address email I’d sent her. Hey, Jo, when you’re settled, let’s meet up for a coffee and a chat about old times. It’s been far too long. She was right. We’d kept in touch after my family moved away and we’d met up sporadically for a while, but eventually contact had dwindled to Christmas cards with a few words scrawled in them. At some point, we’d added email addresses to those Christmas cards, and when I’d emailed about my change of address, I’d provided my mobile number. Lynne had remained living in the area, though not in the village itself, all these years. It would be good to catch up and reminisce. I didn’t yet know how much I wanted to tell her of my recent problems, however. But that wouldn’t happen just yet. I had a thousand boxes to unpack. I wanted to meet my new neighbours, but so far I’d been too shy to knock on their doors. I wanted to be living here, I wanted to meet with Lynne and reminisce, but at the same time, I didn’t want to meet anyone else from back then. At least not yet. I needed a new start, a new beginning in a place I felt safe. And I needed to lay the demons from the past to rest.