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A Dry Spell

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the highly acclaimed author of Small Pleasures - longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

In 1976, four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of that fateful summer are coming back to haunt them....

And repercussions are just what Guy doesn't need: his wife, Jane, is moving swiftly from slightly eccentric to downright peculiar, their three-year-old daughter seems set on destroying Jane's sanity, and now even God's gone quiet on him.

As for Nina, she's having enough trouble with her son, James. He's got exams looming, a new girlfriend with pneumatic breasts, and now, it seems, he's on drugs. Nina certainly won't welcome any ghosts from the past.

Life isn't going smoothly for anyone. But when Hugo, long-forgotten agent of misfortune, threatens to pay them all a visit, disaster seems unavoidable.

©2000 Clare Chambers (P)2021 Penguin Audio Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Haunted Comedy
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A good reflective listen without causing stress. A story, read well, about friendship and caring relationships.

A relatable story

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I couldn’t listen to the novel due to the execrable accent. I love Clare Chambers.

That S African Accent

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A bit slow to start but really glad I stuck with it. Brilliant characters. Gentle pace. Really enjoyed it.

Great

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Just brilliant an amazing story- poignant and witty with it- and very well narrated. Unmissable

Superb

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After a promising start in which the author’s skill with character writing fleshes out a story with multiple strands very well, further developments begin to lose energy.

As the central characters go through a pivotal interlude in a desert region in Africa some twenty years before the main narrative is set, a sort of lassitude seems to afflict them and also the book. By the perfunctory end even the author seems to have lost some interest in her people.

Chambers writes with her usual amused humanism but, although superbly performed by a cast of one, this is not the author’s best work.

Running on empty by the end

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