4.2
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11,184 ratings
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A novel to cure your Downton Abbey withdrawal . . . a delightful story about nontraditional romantic relationships, class snobbery and the everybody-knows-everybody complications of living in a small community.”—The Washington Post
The bestselling author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand returns with a breathtaking novel of love on the eve of World War I that reaches far beyond the small English town in which it is set.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND NPR
East Sussex, 1914. It is the end of England’s brief Edwardian summer, and everyone agrees that the weather has never been so beautiful. Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha, who lives with her husband in the small, idyllic coastal town of Rye. Agatha’s husband works in the Foreign Office, and she is certain he will ensure that the recent saber rattling over the Balkans won’t come to anything. And Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master.
When Beatrice Nash arrives with one trunk and several large crates of books, it is clear she is significantly more freethinking—and attractive—than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her beloved father, who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching and writing.
But just as Beatrice comes alive to the beauty of the Sussex landscape and the colorful characters who populate Rye, the perfect summer is about to end. For despite Agatha’s reassurances, the unimaginable is coming. Soon the limits of progress, and the old ways, will be tested as this small Sussex town and its inhabitants go to war.
Praise for The Summer Before the War
“What begins as a study of a small-town society becomes a compelling account of war and its aftermath.”—Woman’s Day
“This witty character study of how a small English town reacts to the 1914 arrival of its first female teacher offers gentle humor wrapped in a hauntingly detailed story.”—Good Housekeeping
“Perfect for readers in a post–Downton Abbey slump . . . The gently teasing banter between two kindred spirits edging slowly into love is as delicately crafted as a bone-china teacup. . . . More than a high-toned romantic reverie for Anglophiles—though it serves the latter purpose, too.”—The Seattle Times
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ISBN-10
0812983203
ISBN-13
978-0812983203
Print length
512 pages
Language
English
Publisher
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Publication date
February 20, 2017
Dimensions
5.3 x 1.1 x 7.91 inches
Item weight
14.8 ounces
These were people who knew more than they said and who understood more quickly than those who talked more.
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It’s a kind of freedom, said Daniel. I am free, not from fear of death, but from believing I can control death.
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She remembered a sudden feeling of anger towards him, as if it were his fault that the sun and breeze did not restore him, and a swift shame in the recognition of her own selfish desire not to have to endure his decline.
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B0104EOGGK
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6448 KB
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“A novel to cure your Downton Abbey withdrawal . . . a delightful story about nontraditional romantic relationships, class snobbery and the everybody-knows-everybody complications of living in a small community.”—The Washington Post
“What begins as a study of a small-town society becomes a compelling account of war and its aftermath.”—Woman’s Day
“This witty character study of how a small English town reacts to the 1914 arrival of its first female teacher offers gentle humor wrapped in a hauntingly detailed story.”—Good Housekeeping
“Perfect for readers in a post–Downton Abbey slump . . . The gently teasing banter between two kindred spirits edging slowly into love is as delicately crafted as a bone-china teacup. . . . More than a high-toned romantic reverie for Anglophiles—though it serves the latter purpose, too.”—The Seattle Times
“[Helen Simonson’s] characters are so vivid, it’s as if a PBS series has come to life. There’s scandal, star-crossed love and fear, but at its heart, The Summer Before the War is about loyalty, love and family.”—AARP: The Magazine
“At once haunting and effervescent, The Summer Before the War demonstrates the sure hand of a master. Helen Simonson’s characters enchant us, her English countryside beguiles us, and her historical intelligence keeps us at the edge of our seats. This luminous story of a family, a town, and a world in their final moments of innocence is as lingering and lovely as a long summer sunset.”—Annie Barrows, author of The Truth According to Us and co-author of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
“Helen Simonson has outdone herself in this radiant follow-up to Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. The provincial town of Rye, East Sussex, in the days just before and after the Great War is so vividly drawn it fairly vibrates. The depth and sensitivity with which she weighs the steep costs and delicate bonds of wartime—and not just for the young men in the trenches, but for every changed life and heart—reveal the full mastery of her storytelling. Simonson is like a Jane Austen for our day and age—she is that good—and The Summer Before the War is nothing short of a treasure.”—Paula McLain, author of The Paris Wife and Circling the Sun
“A bright confection of a book morphs into a story of dignity and backbone. . . . This book is beautifully plotted and morally astute.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Simonson’s second novel paints a sensitive, witty, luminous portrait of England at the outbreak of World War I.”—Shelf Awareness
“This novel is just the ticket for fans of Simonson’s debut, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, and for any reader who enjoys leisurely fiction steeped in the British past.”—Booklist
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Chapter One
The town of Rye rose from the flat marshes like an island, its tumbled pyramid of red-tiled roofs glowing in the slanting evening light. The high Sussex bluffs were a massive, unbroken line of shadow from east to west, the fields breathed out the heat of the day, and the sea was a sheet of hammered pewter. Standing at the tall French windows, Hugh Grange held his breath in a vain attempt to suspend the moment in time as he used to do when he was a little boy, in this same, slightly shabby drawing room, and the lighting of the lamps had been the signal for his aunt to send him to bed. He smiled now to think of how long and late those summer evenings had run and how he had always complained bitterly until he was allowed to stay up well beyond bedtime. Small boys, he now knew, were inveterate fraudsters and begged, pleaded, and cajoled for added rights and treats with innocent eyes and black hearts.
The three boys his aunt had asked him to tutor this summer had relieved him of half a sovereign and most of his books before he realized that they neither were as hungry as their sighs proposed nor had any interest in Ivanhoe except for what it might bring when flogged to the man with the secondhand bookstall in the town market. He held no grudge. Instead he admired their ferret wits and held some small dream that his brief teaching and example might turn sharpness into some intellectual curiosity by the time the grammar school began again.
The door to the drawing room was opened with a robust hand, and Hugh’s cousin, Daniel, stood back with a mock bow to allow their Aunt Agatha to pass into the room. “Aunt Agatha says there isn’t going to be a war,” said Daniel, coming in behind her, laughing. “And so of course there won’t be. They would never dream of defying her.” Aunt Agatha tried to look severe but only managed to cross her eyes and almost stumbled into a side table due to the sudden blurring of her vision.
“That isn’t what I said at all,” she said, trying to secure her long embroidered scarf, an effort as futile as resting a flat kite on a round boulder, thought Hugh, as the scarf immediately began to slide sideways again. Aunt Agatha was still a handsome woman at forty-five, but she was inclined to stoutness and had very few sharp planes on which to drape her clothing. Tonight’s dinner dress, in slippery chiffon, possessed a deep, sloppy neckline and long Oriental sleeves. Hugh hoped it would maintain its dignity through dinner, for his aunt liked to embellish her conversation with expansive gestures.
“What does Uncle John say?” asked Hugh, stepping to a tray of decanters to pour his aunt her usual glass of Madeira. “No chance he’s coming down tomorrow?” He had hoped to ask his uncle’s opinion on a smaller but no less important subject. After years devoted to his medical studies, Hugh found himself not only on the point of becoming primary assistant surgeon to Sir Alex Ramsey, one of England’s leading general surgeons, but also quite possibly in love with his surgeon’s very pretty daughter, Lucy. He had held rather aloof from Lucy the past year, perhaps to prove to himself, and others, that his affection for her was not connected to any hopes of advancement. This had only made him a favorite of hers among the various students and younger doctors who flocked around her father, but it was not until this summer, when she and her father left for an extended lecture tour in the Italian Lakes, that he had felt a pleasurable misery in her absence. He found he missed her dancing eyes, the toss of her pale hair as she laughed at some dry comment he made; he even missed the little spectacles she wore to copy her father’s case files or reply to his voluminous correspondence. She was fresh from the schoolroom and sometimes distracted by all the pleasures London offered bright young people, but she was devoted to her father and would make, thought Hugh, an exceptional wife for a rising young surgeon. He wished to discuss, with some urgency, whether he might be in a position to contemplate matrimony.
Uncle John was a sensible man and through the years had always seemed swiftly to understand whatever difficulty Hugh stammered out and would help talk the matter over until Hugh was convinced he had resolved some intractable problem all on his own. Hugh was no longer a small boy and now understood some of his uncle’s wisdom to be the result of diplomatic training, but he knew his uncle’s affection to be genuine. His own parents’ parting words, as they left for a long-awaited year of travel, had been to apply to Uncle John in any case of need.
“Your uncle says they are all working feverishly to smooth things over, before everyone’s summer holiday,” said his aunt. “He tells me nothing, of course, but the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary spent much of the day closeted with the King.” Uncle John was a senior official in the Foreign Office, and the usually sleepy summer precincts of Whitehall had been crammed with busy civil servants, politicians, and generals since the Archduke’s assassination in Sarajevo. “Anyway he telephoned to say he met the schoolteacher and transferred her to Charing Cross to catch the last train, so she’ll be getting in after dinner. We’ll give her a late supper.”
“At such a late hour, wouldn’t it be kinder to deliver her to her rooms in town and maybe have Cook send down something cold?” said Daniel, ignoring Hugh’s proffered dry sherry and pouring a glass of Uncle John’s best whisky. “I’m sure she’ll be horribly fagged and not up to a room full of people in evening dress.” He tried to keep a neutral face, but Hugh detected a slight moue of distaste at the thought of entertaining the new schoolteacher his aunt had found. Since graduating from Balliol in June, Daniel had spent the first few weeks of the summer in Italy as the guest of an aristocratic college chum, and had developed a sense of social superiority that Hugh was dying to see Aunt Agatha knock out of his silly head. Instead Agatha had been patient, saying, “Oh, let him have his taste of the high life. Don’t you think his heart will be broken soon enough? When Daniel goes into the Foreign Office this autumn, as your Uncle John has taken such pains to arrange, I’m sure his friend will drop him in an instant. Let him have his hour of glamour.”
Hugh was of the opinion that Daniel should be made to understand his place, but he loved his Aunt Agatha and he thought any continued argument might lead her to think he resented Daniel being her favorite. Daniel’s mother, Agatha’s sister, had died when Daniel was only five, and his father was a strange, distant sort of man. Daniel had been sent to boarding school a month after his mother’s death, and Agatha had been his refuge in the Christmas and summer holidays. Hugh had always been torn about Christmas. He spent it at home in London with his parents, who loved him and made a great fuss of him. He would have preferred if they could have all gone down to Sussex to Agatha’s house together, but his mother, who was Uncle John’s sister, liked to be among her friends in town, and his father did not like to be away from the bank too long at Christmas. Hugh had been happy in the midst of piles of striped wrapping paper, huge mysterious boxes, and the dishes of sweets and fruits set all around their Kensington villa. But sometimes, when he was sent to bed and the music from his parents’ guests drifted up to his room, he would lie in bed and peer out the window over the dark rooftops and try to see all the way to Sussex, where no doubt Aunt Agatha was tucking Daniel in with one of her wild stories of giants and elves who lived in caves under the Sussex Downs and whose parties could be mistaken sometimes as thunder.
“Don’t be silly, Daniel. Miss Nash will stay here this evening,” said Aunt Agatha, bending to switch on the electric lamp by the flowered couch. She sat down and stretched out her feet, which were encased in Oriental slippers embroidered, rather strangely, with lobsters. “I had to fight to bring the full weight of the School Board to bear on the governors to hire a woman. I mean to get a good look at her and make sure she understands what’s to be done.”
The local grammar school was one of his aunt’s many social causes. She believed in education for all and seemed to expect great leaders of men to emerge from the grubby-kneed group of farmers’ and merchants’ boys who crowded the new red-brick school building out beyond the railway tracks.
“You mean you want her to get a good look at you,” said Hugh. “I’m sure she’ll be suitably cowed.”
“I’m with the governors,” said Daniel. “It takes a man to keep a mob of schoolboys in line.”
“Nonsense,” said Agatha. “Besides, you can’t just drum up teachers these days. Our last Latin master, Mr. Puddlecombe, was only here a year and then he had the nerve to tell us he was off to try his luck with a cousin in Canada.”
“Well, school had almost broken up for the summer, Auntie,” said Hugh.
“Which made it all the more impossible,” said Agatha. “We were fortunate that your Uncle John spoke to Lord Marbely and that Lady Marbely had been looking for a position for this young woman. She is a niece apparently, and the Marbelys highly recommended her; though I did get a hint that maybe they had an ulterior motive for getting her out of Gloucestershire.”
“Do they have a son?” asked Daniel. “That’s usually the story.”
“Oh no, Lady Marbely took pains to assure me she’s quite plain,” said Aunt Agatha. “I may be progressive, but I would never hire a pretty teacher.”
“We’d better eat dinner soon,” said Hugh, consulting the battered pocket watch that had been his grandfather’s and that his parents were always begging to replace with something more modern. The dinner gong rang just as he spoke.
“Yes, I’d like to digest properly before this paragon descends upon us,” said Daniel, downing the rest of his glass in a swallow. “I assume I have to be introduced and can’t just hide in my room?”
“Would you go with Smith to pick her up, Hugh?” said Agatha. “Two of you would probably overwhelm the poor girl, and obviously I can’t trust Daniel not to sneer at her.”
“What if Hugh falls in love with her?” asked Daniel. Hugh was tempted to retort that his affections were already engaged, but his matrimonial intentions were too important to be subjected to Daniel’s disrespectful teasing, and so he merely gave his cousin a look of scorn. “After all,” added Daniel, “Hugh is so terribly plain himself.”
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Helen Simonson
Helen Simonson is the New York Times bestselling author of Major Pettigrew's last Stand (2010) and The Summer Before The War (2016). Her newest novel, The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club will be published in May 2024. She was born in England and spent her teenage years in a small village near Rye, in East Sussex. A graduate of the London School of Economics, with an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton, she is a former travel advertising executive, dual US/UK citizen and a proud New Yorker. Helen is a longtime resident of Brooklyn and is married with two sons.
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Customer reviews
4.2 out of 5
11,184 global ratings
Elaine Schroller
5
Definitely an addition to my list of all-time favorite WWI novels.
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2024
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After having read so much WWI-related fiction and non-fiction to research my own novels, I rarely cry while reading WWI novels anymore, but I began sobbing during the final chapters of The Summer Before the War.
Beginning with Edwardian village life during the summer before WWI begins, Simonson delves deeply into the intertwined lives of two intelligent women, Beatrice Nash and Agatha Hunt, of differing ages and social circumtances, and the young men who bind them together through the first devastating year of the war.
Perfect for fans, like me, of Caroline Scott's The Poppy Wife (that's the US title; it's The Photographer of the Lost in the UK) which spotlights lesser-told character stories and Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford, which beautifully details village life. I finished The Summer Before the War last night and I'm ready to read it again today. Definitely an addition to my list of all-time favorite WWI novels.
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Roger Brunyate
5
Made for Masterpiece
Reviewed in the United States on March 25, 2016
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Helen Simonson may now live in Brooklyn, but she has shown herself a masterly portraitist of small-town English life. With MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND, she brought an Anglo-Indian old fogey into the modern age, and showed him to be not such a fogey after all. Now, in THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR, she goes back by a century to 1914, to Rye in Sussex, near where she was born. There is certainly a fair share of fogeys, minor aristocrats, matriarchs, and petty officials; some surprise us by how they behave, some are far worse, but through it all runs a vein of English social comedy nurtured in Austen, Trollope, and Forster. Simonson is a dab hand at dialogue, and there are enough bons mots and put-downs to keep Maggie Smith in business for a month.
Yes indeed, for the example of DOWNTON ABBEY made me realize that Simonson's latest novel is tailor-made for Masterpiece Theatre. It is longer than MAJOR PETTIGREW and has a far larger scope: England on the verge of the Great War. In some respects, it is a WW1 version of the PBS WW2 series, HOME FIRES, showing the effects of war on a small town. Though beautifully concentrated in setting, it offers a wide range of characters. These even include Rye's most famous literary resident, Henry James, though given a new name (and rather longer lifespan) as Mr. Tillingham. Writers are important in the novel: one of the major characters, Daniel Bookham, is a poet in the Rupert Brooke mold, there is a scandalous pair of popular novelists among the minor characters, and the protagonist, Beatrice Nash, is a struggling writer who comes to Rye as a Latin teacher. Her intelligence and spirit, and her utter refusal to play the shrinking violet, make her a most attractive heroine, a woman for our times, yet trapped within the patriarchy and condescension of her own.
The title is a misnomer, actually. War is declared on page 100 or so, and there is even a section in the Flanders trenches towards the end. But the first battlefront is in Rye itself. Beatrice is the choice of one of the two grandes dames of the town, Agatha West, the wife of a high Whitehall official. Much of the comedy comes from her success in scoring over her nemesis, Bettina Fothergill, the odious wife of the officious mayor. But disputes over schoolteachers are displaced by more serious things when the first refugees arrive from Belgium, and housing them becomes for some an exercise in conspicuous charity. And from there, we progress to contests over raising recruits to volunteer to Do Their Bit in France. And from there, to France itself.
Another Masterpiece Theatre quality is the mixture of narrative genres covered by the novel. Romance, of course. Beatrice Nash is quite determined never to get married, but the astute reader soon wonders how long that will last. There is also an extensive subplot involving the love between two men, though it is never called by name. Another genre is the medical story. One of the characters, Agatha West's nephew Hugh Grange, is a young surgeon; his expertise will involve him in several crises in Rye, and then take him to a field hospital in France (reminding us of yet another PBS series, THE CRIMSON FIELD). And there is a very strong thread of protest against social injustice: the undervaluing of women, lower classes, gypsies, victims of sexual assault, and people choosing unconventional lifestyles. Despite the context of romantic comedy, such moments made me angry, and very sad.
Laughter, romance, intrigue, literary comment, historical insight, and passionate indignation: this is quite a range for a single book. In comparing Helen Simonson's work to Masterpiece Theatre, I know I am labeling it as a popular novel. But it is very good indeed at what it does: Masterpiece-worthy because written by a master.
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H. Bok
5
Brilliant and touching historical novel
Reviewed in the United States on July 10, 2017
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Historical fiction can be tough. Often the author approaches the task defensively, overexplaining the setting in narrative and dialogue. It’s rare when an author has the confidence to throw readers into the deep end, challenging us to accept the world as it is depicted and swim along with the characters.
Helen Simonson is an author of the latter type. We are deposited in the coastal town of Rye in 1914 and it immediately comes alive before our eyes. The mores, the values, the technology and science and preoccupations of the era are all presented without apology or concern about our ability to adapt. The characters’ dialogue is the same, witty and quick and full of allusion. And it all works, gloriously.
Beatrice Nash is a young woman who has lived a cosmopolitan youth with her peripatetic father; he has died, and she is cast out upon the world with little to go on with. She has wealthy but tyrannical and unsympathetic relatives, and would prefer to make her own way even if it means enduring the humiliations of poverty. She lands a position as a Latin teacher in the general school at Rye; there she is befriended and defended by the Kent family against the forces of conformity, which have their doubts about the propriety of a female schoolmistress.
The Rye of this book is a fully realized universe of vivid characters, petty social vendettas, and narrow insularity. The world is going to war and the people of Rye are concerned with holding patriotic parades, taking up collections, adopting a few refugees, and other largely symbolic responses to the crisis. There is a dominant culture of stultifying propriety to which the realities of the inhabitants bear little relation, requiring hypocritical contortions on the part of those who would defend the traditional ways. There are gay people and illegitimate children and adulterous relationships and all sorts of challenges to the prevailing order, and these must all be studiously ignored or explained away. The text is consistently elliptical about the various divergences from the “norm,” because the gayness or the illegitimacy or what have you are not the point—the real scandal is the essential cruelty of society’s response to them.
All of this smallness is depicted with a ruthless clarity worthy of Jane Austen. The scenes and dialogue are funny and devil-may-care at the start, but as the summer goes on and the war becomes more serious, storm clouds gather over Rye. Young men begin to enlist and not return; relationships are distorted and people crack under the strain. The hypocrisies and petty cruelties start to cut deeper, but people also rise to the occasion and transcend their limitations.
This is a wonderful book: powerful, clear-sighted, written with tact and grace. It has a clear ethical thread woven so deeply into the fabric that you never feel lectured or manipulated. And as a work of historical fiction it is superb.
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bonnie mitchell
5
Beautiful book
Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2024
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Having just finished The Summer Before the War, I am grateful to the author for a wonderful book So thrilled with delightful sentences that I thoughtfully read over and over. Her characters were also enthralling and captivating as well as Managed skillfully. This is the kind of excellent writing that almost Spoils one for reading another less competent Book. Cheers and gratitude to the author.
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Kenneth C. Mahieu
5
Very different from Major Pettigrew and incredibly it's even better.
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2016
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"The Summer Before the War" (SBW) is another excellent book from Helen Simonson, following her debut novel of 3 years ago, "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand". SBW is a good bit longer (496 pages) than MP (379) but has the same elegant writing, with beautiful descriptions of the SE coastal village of Rye, Sussex, the countryside and most importantly the excellent cast of fascinating characters. The pace of the story, to state it positively is rather leisurely for the first two thirds of the book, then things jump from second to fourth gear. But by now we know the characters of SBW very well, have formed an attachment to some, and have developed a foreboding of doom knowing that WWl will breakout at any moment.
Beatrice is a young teacher who has recently lost her father and is on her own in a new place for the first time. She is teaching Latin to some of the school boys who will be joining her full class in the fall. Beatrice has befriended Agatha Kent one of the three grande-dames of Rye, and aunt to cousins Hugh (soon to be a medical doctor) and Daniel ( a poet). There are another dozen characters that the reader comes to know quite well.
The War changes everything; many of the characters in the story are slow to realize it as Europeans at the time expected the war to last only months, certainly not to drag on for more than four years. The tension ramps up quickly and SBW becomes almost impossible to put down in its last 100 pages .. The conclusion is particularly well done. I can only hope that it will not be another 3-4 years until we see Simonson's next book.
I give SBW 5 stars though it is not without its flaws. The first two thirds of the story is very slow, saved only by excellent prose and the not the slow-cooking plot. Also there is a solution which resolves the Celeste problem that seemed to me to be very far fetched, almost disappointingly so. But the story gets back on track soon after and is golden from that point until the end. Enjoy!
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