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Autumn
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How to Be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
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Normal People
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Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege.
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It plunges under your skin and invades you.
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The Green Road
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A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion - a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them. The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age, their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds.
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Another Family Gathering
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Home Fire
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Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London - or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs.
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Gripping
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Lincoln in the Bardo
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Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other, for no one but Saunders could conceive it. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery.
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Mistake
- By L on 13-07-17
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Elmet
- By: Fiona Mozley
- Narrated by: Gareth Bennett-Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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An atmospheric and thrilling debut set in Yorkshire - perfect for fans of The Loney and The Essex Serpent. Fresh and distinctive writing from an exciting new voice in fiction, Elmet is an unforgettable novel about family, as well as a beautiful meditation on landscape. Daniel is heading north. He is looking for someone. The simplicity of his early life with Daddy and Cathy has turned sour and fearful.
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- By bookylady on 13-10-17
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How to Be Both
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
How to Be Both is a novel all about art's versatility. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.
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Dealing with loss
- By Carien on 21-03-15
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Normal People
- By: Sally Rooney
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. When they both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, a connection that has grown between them lasts long into the following years. This is an exquisite love story about how a person can change another person's life - a simple yet profound realisation that unfolds beautifully over the course of the novel. It tells us how difficult it is to talk about how we feel and it tells us - blazingly - about cycles of domination, legitimacy and privilege.
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It plunges under your skin and invades you.
- By Wras on 18-10-18
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The Green Road
- By: Anne Enright
- Narrated by: Caroline Lennon
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion - a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them. The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age, their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds.
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Another Family Gathering
- By Sharon on 23-08-15
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Home Fire
- By: Kamila Shamsie
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother's death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can't stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London - or their brother, Parvaiz, who's disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew. Then Eamonn enters the sisters' lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London worlds away from theirs.
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Gripping
- By Alice on 14-07-18
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Lincoln in the Bardo
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by a dazzling chorus of voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is a literary experience unlike any other, for no one but Saunders could conceive it. February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved 11-year-old son, Willie, dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery.
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Mistake
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Nine men: each of them at a different stage of life, away from home, and striving - in the suburbs of Prague, in a cheap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive here and now. Tracing an arc from the spring of youth to the winter of old age, All That Man Is brings these separate lives together to show us men as they are - ludicrous and inarticulate, shocking and despicable; vital, pitiable, hilarious, and full of heartfelt longing.
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Full of empathy
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4 3 2 1
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On March 3, 1947, in the maternity ward of Beth Israel Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, Archibald Isaac Ferguson, the one and only child of Rose and Stanley Ferguson, is born. From that single beginning, Ferguson's life will take four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four Fergusons made of the same genetic material, four boys who are the same boy, will go on to lead four parallel and entirely different lives. Family fortunes diverge. Loves and friendships and intellectual passions contrast.
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I honestly tried to get through this.
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Conversations with Friends
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- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Frances is a 21-year-old college student in Dublin; she performs at spoken word events with her best friend and ex-lover, Bobbi. When they are profiled by journalist Melissa, they enter an orbit of beautiful houses and raucous dinner parties. Initially unimpressed, Frances begins an affair with Nick, Melissa's husband, which gives way to an unexpected intimacy.
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Great performance of a not so great novel
- By Benry on 25-10-18
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Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Originally four lectures given by Ali Smith at Oxford University, Artful is a tidal wave of ideas in four thematically organised bursts of thought: On Time, On Form, On Edge and On Offer and On Reflection. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. Full of both the poignancy and humour of fiction and all the sideways insights and jaunty angles you would expect from Ali Smith’s criticism
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Initially confusing, ultimately engrossing
- By B. on 03-04-16
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Exit West
- By: Mohsin Hamid
- Narrated by: Mohsin Hamid
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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This is Nadia. She is fiercely independent, with an excellent sense of humour and a love of smoking alone on her balcony late at night. This is Saeed. He is sweet and shy and kind to strangers. He also has a balcony but he uses his for stargazing. This is their story: a love story, but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow.
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Poetic dystopia
- By RebeccaL on 08-12-18
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History of Wolves
- By: Emily Fridlund
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- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Even a lone wolf wants to belong.... Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in an ex-commune beside a lake in the beautiful, austere backwoods of Northern Minnesota. The other girls at school call Linda 'Freak' or 'Commie'. Her parents mostly leave her to her own devices whilst the other inhabitants have grown up and moved on. So when the perfect family - mother, father and their little boy, Paul - move into the cabin across the lake, Linda insinuates her way into the family's orbit.
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An absorbing novel, with hidden depths.
- By bookylady on 10-10-17
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Fen
- By: Daisy Johnson
- Narrated by: Fiona Boylan
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Fen is a liminal land. Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt. This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a, well, what?
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Milkman
- By: Anna Burns
- Narrated by: Bríd Brennan
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
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Very, Very Good
- By David M on 20-10-18
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Everything Under
- By: Daisy Johnson
- Narrated by: Charlie Sanderson
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2018. Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of 16, though - almost a lifetime ago - and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature. A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago....
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Powerful tale
- By Vivienne on 15-10-18
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Reservoir 13
- By: Jon McGregor
- Narrated by: Matt Bates
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Midwinter in the early years of this century. A teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. The villagers are called up to join the search, fanning out across the moors as the police set up roadblocks and a crowd of news reporters descends on their usually quiet home. Meanwhile, there is work that must still be done: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search for the missing girl goes on, but so does everyday life. As it must.
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Highly tedious
- By David on 02-03-18
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There But For The
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Diane Beck
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough. Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever. Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.
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Intricate, exuberant, humane
- By nkh21 on 14-09-16
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The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Overstory by Richard Powers, read by Suzanne Toren. The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
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This book is amazing
- By ANNABEL on 18-02-19
Summary
Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy and the colour hit of Pop Art - via a bit of skullduggery - Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past.
Autumn is a take on popular culture and a meditation in a world growing ever more bordered: what constitutes richness and worth?
Autumn is the first instalment in Seasonal: four stand-alone stories, separate yet interconnected and cyclical, exploring what time is and how we experience it.
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- Rachel Redford
- 08-11-16
a collage of leaf-fall & never-ending stories
If you've met Ali Smith's work before, you'll know not to expect a conventional chronological story! Elisabeth Demand in present time is a 32-year-old junior history of art lecturer 'living the dream' according to her mother, but not so great for Elisabeth with no permanent contract and living in her old student flat. The narrative threads weave in and out of the previous 24 years going back to Elisabeth as an 8 year-old forging the loving friendship with a new elderly neighbour Daniel Gluck, the first seriously interesting person she has ever known who collects art (particularly the work of 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty who died in her twenties and in real time now outside the novel is being rediscovered), and who always asks Elisabeth what she is reading. As a 32 year-old, Elisabeth is visiting the much-loved Gluck now aged 101 who is slipping in and out of a dreamworld of memories as he slowly dies.
Pauline Boty and her work is one of the recurrent themes of this inventive and allusive book; along with the Profumo Affair (Boty painted a picture of Christine Keeler sitting on that chair backwards); and Elisabeth's repeated efforts to get her Check and Send passport application sent off only to find her head in her photo is ruled to be the wrong size after queuing for hours at the Post Office. These themes are tightly secured within an up to the very last moment post-Brexit Britain (how did this book come out so soon??), although neither the word 'Brexit' nor 'referendum' are mentioned - just the distress and perplexity of the country; and an unequal society regulated with mind-numbing rules.
What provides another layer to this intriguing, linguistically inventive, stream-of-thoughts novel are the allusions. This is Autumn (the other three seasons are to follow), the season of falling leaves, Keatsian mists and sycamore wings, all part of the pattern of dream and reality, death and renewal, loss and rediscovery: the fabric behind the novel's never-ending stories. Elisabeth is reading Brave New World, which is ironic as she waits her turn in the Post Office queue, and there are echoes in Smith's syntax throughout of the Tale of Two Cities - the best of times, the worst of times. In the very last sentence of the novel she has tucked in an unacknowledged quoted phrase 'wanwood, leafmeal' from Gerard Manley Hopkins's beautiful and apposite poem of 'unleaving' and grieving, 'Spring and Fall', which says it all about this season.
I haven't heard this narrator Melody Grove before, but she is impressive with what must be a very difficult book to read out loud. She helps make sense of what is sometimes quirky and quite difficult to follow, and makes Elisabeth from child to adult a real person. This is a novel you could listen to more than once and find more in it each time.
23 of 25 people found this review helpful
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- Duvethead
- 11-12-17
Beautifully crafted novel
I wanted to listen to it all over again once I’d finished. So many profound reflections hidden without the narrative.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
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- Hugh M. Clarke
- 29-04-18
Disappointing
There has been much hype about this book. I was very disappointed. I found it dull, uninteresting, at times patronising and at times juvenile. There was little or no story and very few insights.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Blind Girl
- Budapest, Hungary
- 21-01-18
Waiting for the winter
All in all accessible, sometimes confusing, sometimes too arty art, sometimes fragmentary. The chapter about Brexit is extraordinary. Story line often victim of artistic breakdown. Narrator was astonishing.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 12-01-18
Weird!
This was a very odd read. It felt like quality writing which was trying to give different layers of meaning but I have absolutely no idea what on earth the story (was there a story?) was about or what any of it meant. Quite strange!
3 of 4 people found this review helpful
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- Suswati
- 09-01-18
Unusual story yet beautiful prose
Ali Smith has a wonderful way with words, describing a relationship between a young girl and her eccentric older neighbour, which seems to mirror the title of this book. Autumn shows the blossoming and withering of a man, Daniel Gluck, describing his younger years as a respected art critic of sorts, and the beauty he was constantly surrounded by. When he meets the younger Elisabeth Demand, he is already in the process of change, but she continues to help him feel alive, while he has a mentor-like relationship with her.
In between, Smith describes all of the major events plaguing Britain. From protesting the Iraq war, to Brexit doom, the perpetual markers that appear in the background of this constant, unwaning friendship. Can love and art really triumph over war? Smith believes it can.
The main issue with this novel is the fact that it is completely disjointed, and ends on a quite anti-climactic note. Read for the tone and not the story.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-12-17
Stellar
A book suggested by my book club. So, so glad. Beautifully constructed & wonderfully performed.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- Sarah B
- 22-11-17
Wonderful performance
Really beautifully narrated. A wonderful story, which is woven really smartly. Lots to think about. No real answers here but just beautiful.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
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- KJ Cannon
- 10-02-19
Disappointing lack of story
A scrappy sort of a book. It goes off at all sorts of angles.No real story at all, just an odd mish mash. The author seems to be using it as an opportunity to get all her personal and political whinges across - full of tired stereotypes - she even has a weird moan about post offices! I haven't read any of her work before and won't bother to read any more. What this book actually has to do with the seasons I have no idea - which is why I bought it...! Smith even thinks cow parsley is poisonous! I wouldn't recommend reading this. It had a lovely start, but apart from that was very disappointing. The only interesting aspect was the Doty and Keller pieces. But these seemed out of balance with the story.
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- Pen Name
- 05-04-17
Brilliant - clever writing
Can't wait fir Winter to be recorded.
This is a book I'll be listening to at least once more!
1 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- Erik
- 10-08-18
moving tale of an unusual friendship
weaves different themes such as contemporary british society, brexit, popart, time passing, love-friendship relarionships despite age differences