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The Guardian
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan audiobook review – a bold memoir of life and near-death
At the start of this boldly experimental memoir, the Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan visits the site of a Japanese labour camp where his late father was interned during the second world war and where he ends up awkwardly having his photo taken with a former guard, Mr Sato. The war ended weeks after the US launched an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing 60,000 people in less than a minute. That bomb also led to Flanagan's father, then days from death, being freed, which in turn allowed him to father a child who would grow up to become a writer. 'How many people need to die in order that you might read this book?' Flanagan asks. Question 7, named after a riddle posed by Chekhov, is a book about the connections and choices that shape our lives, for better or worse. Flanagan is the narrator, his reading by turns mournful, reflective and quizzical as he plots a path through the lives of his parents, the writer HG Wells, Wells's sometime inamorata, Rebecca West, and the physicist Leo Szilard, who masterminded the nuclear chain reaction that was instrumental in the creation of the bomb. These historical vignettes are intertwined with Flanagan's own childhood memories of life in Tasmania, an island with a troubled history, and culminate in his account of a near-death experience at the age of 21, when his kayak became wedged underwater. As he assesses his own complex heritage and those of pivotal figures from the past, Flanagan reflects that 'there is no memory without shame'. Available via Penguin Audio, 7hr 47min FreeAmanda Knox, Headline, 10hr 17min Knox narrates her memoir detailing her struggles to adapt to a normal life after her wrongful imprisonment in Italy. Our EveningsAlan Hollinghurst, Picador, 16hr 36minThe Line of Beauty author's latest novel about the diverging lives of two public schoolboys is read by Prasanna Puwanarajah.
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
All Fours by Miranda July audiobook review – the frank, sexy novel everyone's been talking about
In the second novel by writer, actor and film-maker Miranda July, a nameless Los Angeles-based artist who has had success 'in several mediums' leaves behind her husband, Harris, and their young child, Sam, to drive across America. She is due at a meeting in New York and has decided to get there via a leisurely road trip. But what starts off as a fleeting break from the mundanity of marriage and motherhood turns into a wild and wonderfully odd unravelling. Just half an hour into her journey, she impulsively leaves the freeway and checks into a scruffy motel. There she is electrified by a younger car hire worker who has 'a Huckleberry Finn/Gilbert Blythe look that I used to flip out over as a teenager.' After the two lock eyes while he squeegees her windscreen (not a euphemism), she decides to pursue him in an unusually chaste love affair. All Fours – which has been shortlisted for this year's Women's Prize for fiction – is narrated by July whose pacy, hypnotic reading skilfully evokes the internal monologue of her protagonist, who pinballs between drily funny and existentially bereft. The book has been called a menopause novel on the basis that it centres on a 45-year-old dismayed at being halfway through her life and past her peak (both her grandmother and aunt killed themselves and she worries she is next in line). But there's more than just dwindling oestrogen in this frank and subversive tale which reflects on desire, freedom and creativity, and shines a light on the complex inner life of a woman. Available via Canongate, 10hr 13min Maternity ServiceEmma Barnett, Penguin Audio, 1hr 50min The Today presenter narrates her manifesto for rethinking women's maternity leave based on her own experiences on motherhood's 'frontline'. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Character LimitKate Conger and Ryan Mac, Penguin Audio, 15hr 20min This blistering behind-the-scenes account of Elon Musk's catastrophic Twitter takeover is read by Edoardo Ballerini.
The Guardian
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Rosarita by Anita Desai audiobook review – a moving tale of memory and identity
In this novella from the three times Booker-shortlisted Anita Desai, a young Indian woman named Bonita is accosted by a chatty stranger who says she recognises her as the daughter of Rosarita, a dear friend she knew years ago at art school in Mexico. Bonita, a language student in San Miguel de Allende, is irritated by the woman and tells her she must be mistaken: 'I don't paint. Nor did my mother.' But then she remembers an old painting that hung in her childhood bedroom depicting a woman seated on a park bench rendered 'in wishy-washy pastels'. In the picture there is a child playing in the sand at the woman's feet. Although they are mother and child, it's as if they have 'no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent'. The actor Meera Simhan is Rosarita's narrator, her solemn and poignant reading drawing out the dreamlike atmosphere of Desai's writing. In this tale of memory and identity, Bonita begins to recall long periods spent at her paternal grandparents' house as a child; there she observed their disapproval at their son's marriage to a woman clearly unsuited to domesticity. Increasingly curious about her mother, whose early life was shaped by the trauma of Indian partition, Bonita agrees to go on a series of excursions with the stranger to see the places Rosarita visited decades earlier. Reality and imagination become intertwined as Bonita absorbs herself in the past and begins to see her once distant mother through new eyes. Available via Picador, 2hr 33min My Beloved MonsterCaleb Carr, Penguin Audio, 13hr 46min Actor James Lurie narrates this moving memoir about Masha, a feisty Siberian cat adopted from a rescue centre, who helped him heal from trauma. Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get OldBrooke Shields, Hachette Audio UK, 9hr 1minThe star of Blue Lagoon and Pretty Baby reflects on what it is to age as a one-time Hollywood sex symbol. Read by the author.
The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Knife by Salman Rushdie audiobook review – 27 seconds that changed everything
On 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie was at a literary conference in Chautauqua, New York, about to deliver a lecture on keeping writers from harm, when a stranger rushed at him with a knife. Rushdie – who in 1989 had a fatwa issued against him by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his death, after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses – was stabbed in his neck, chest, hand and eye. Knife is Rushdie's memoir of his 'near-death' in which he recalls seeing his attacker and thinking to himself: 'So it's you. Here you are.' The attack lasted 27 seconds and, to this day, the author remains bewildered that he didn't fight back. 'Was I so feeble that I couldn't make the slightest attempt to defend myself?' he asks. As baffling to him is that the man, a Lebanese-American whom he calls 'The A' (short for 'Assailant' or 'Ass'), had never read The Satanic Verses. Instead, he had watched clips of Rushdie lecturing on YouTube and concluded that he was 'disingenuous'. A harrowing account of the before, during and after of a violent assault, Knife is given added power and immediacy in being narrated by Rushdie himself. His tone throughout moves between anger, resignation and dry humour. While he is unsparing with the details – for a while his eyeball, which could not be saved, lolled on his cheek like 'a large soft-boiled egg' – there are also outpourings of love for his friends, family and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The ultimate intention in Knife is to reveal how love triumphs over cruelty and to 'answer violence with art'. Available via Penguin Audio, 6hr 22min Love in ExileShon Faye, Penguin Audio, 7hr 1min An insightful memoir of one woman's search for love, the commodification of romance and finding one's self-worth. Read by the author. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Show Don't TellCurtis Sittenfeld, Penguin Audio, 10hr 32minA cast of narrators including Xe Sands, Michael Crouch and Kristen Sieh read this short-story collection from the Romantic Comedy author.
The Guardian
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss audiobook review – a life shaped by anorexia and literature
A haunting exploration of a life shaped by literature and anorexia, The Fell author Sarah Moss's memoir is told in the second person, as if the present-day Moss is directly addressing her past self. During her 1970s childhood, when every adult woman she knows is on a diet, Moss absorbs the message that she must be smart but quiet and amenable; she must be pretty and sylph-like but should never appear vain. Threaded through the narrative are the books of her formative years, by Arthur Ransome, Louisa May Alcott, Sylvia Plath and the Brontës, in which Moss is alert to depictions of women and femininity (her reading was done in secret, since her parents regarded it as a sign of indolence). Moss begins to see her body as a battleground, something over which she must exert control and power. This leads her to obsessively count calories, decline cake at birthday parties (for which she is often congratulated) and, eventually, stop eating altogether. The Scottish actor Morven Christie is the narrator: her reading is measured and reflective, drawing out the forlorn beauty of Moss's prose. She also inhabits the brutality of the author's inner voices, which berate her when they suspect her of disingenuousness or self-pity and hiss at her: 'Shut up, no one cares.' An eventual diagnosis of anorexia is followed by the prescribed treatment: an instruction to eat more and drink four glasses of milk a day. Little wonder Moss's illness follows her into adulthood, coming to a head during the pandemic where she becomes severely malnourished and a doctor warns her: 'If we do not feed you now, you will die.' Available via Picador, 8hr 28min A Death in the ParishThe Rev Richard Coles, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 8hr 25minThe kindly sleuth Canon Daniel Clement investigates another murder in the not-so-sleepy village of Champton. Read by the author. A Woman Like MeDiane Abbott, Penguin Audio, 13hr 27minWestminster's mother of the House reads her memoir charting her path to becoming Britain's first Black female MP, and the personal and political struggles that followed.
