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News From Nowhere

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News From Nowhere

By: William Morris
Narrated by: Barnaby Edwards
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About this listen

News from Nowhere (1890) is the best-known prose work of William Morris. The novel describes the encounter between a visitor from the 19th century, William Guest, and a decentralized and humane socialist future. Set over a century after a revolutionary upheaval in 1952, these 'Chapters from a Utopian Romance' recount his journey across London and up the Thames to Kelmscott Manor, Morris's own country house in Oxfordshire.

Drawing on the work of John Ruskin and Karl Marx, Morris's audiobook is not only an evocative statement of his egalitarian convictions but also a distinctive contribution to the utopian tradition. Morris's rejection of state socialism and his ambition to transform the relationship between humankind and the natural world, give News from Nowhere a particular resonance for modern readers.

©2013 William Morris (P)2013 Audible Ltd Classics Utopian

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Editor reviews

Author Morris was a socialist, a pattern-maker, an environmentalist, and a writer. Here Morris imagines an England reformed through civic rebellion against social injustice. A young man goes to sleep and wakes up in the far future, in an England that has become a communist, rural utopia. British narrator Barnaby Edwards employs a droll and tony voice when reciting this mannered and far-fetched text. The novella is written in first person, and the protagonist is young. The story registers like an essay, and the protagonist sounds far older than his years. This book is mainly an imaginative vehicle for Morris to decry societal wrongs and propose an idealistic alternative. Matching Morris’ intent Edwards performs as if he is lecturing.
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William Morris was a true ‘visionary’. The book is fascinating. His analysis of colonialism spot on. His love of nature and beauty evident.
I found the narration rather stiff and stilted - especially to begin with. The female voices slightly irritating and camp. Other than that a ‘must read’.

Fascinating book. Rather stilted narration.

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I read this to get a vision of a beautiful London, and to a large extent it delivered. there were lots of little details of the sort of place I would like to live in aesthetically. it also gave me insight into the mind of moris and his movement, I found the way he straddled a traditional aesthetic sense with a modern moralistic sense interesting and how they often bled into eachother. there is absolutely no merit to the plot, no devise that gives it power, barely the basics of 'conflict' which drives almost all stories. interestingly HG Wells did not suffer this defect and I don't think this is incidental to his more pessimistic view despite the shared belief in socialism. the plot is there to tie the utopian vision to a digestible format and I cant help but share Wells' cynicism but to a much higher degreem

not to be read for literary merit

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The only drawback to this wonderful story was the rather unnecessarily plumby Victorian diction of the "guest" paired with the equally earthy accent of the rural people.
Other than this, a wonderful listen, and a beautiful picture painted of an idyllic English utopia and summertime.
Recommended!

Morris’s beautiful Utopia brought to life

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Read this for the first time at university. Good narrative & well read. Political philosophy about what a decent society would look like.

Very good

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Had this on my list of books to read for AGES. I'm pleased to have waited as I thought the voice acting was very good and fitted Morris' flowery poetic writing and arts and crafts world vision. Apparently he wrote it because he was upset by another utopian book called 'looking backwards'. Which I also enjoyed recently as part of my personal utopian studies.

Justice done to a classic

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Needed to find some optimism in the world. And William Morris have it to me 😁
Apart from his obsession with women's good looks, I really enjoyed his vision for humanity's future.
Let is all dream. And act to make those dreams a reality

Be happy

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Somehow I had not heard of William Morris as a writer of utopian Communist fiction in spite of having known intimately of his other work. I'm not sure how I overlooked that until now, but I'm glad to have finally explored his vision in this work. News from Nowhere might be over a hundred years old, but it still rings true. In so many ways it pains me to no end to think about the world as having only gotten worse and more consumer driven since this was written, the wealth disparity even more pronounced. This book is masterfully eloquent in delivering a very well fleshed out vision of a possible future as well as the struggles of the past (which match so well our present day that it's hard to believe that this wasn't written more recently). I would recommend it to anyone who wants to paint a better vision of what a more equal future could really look like in their mind.

a masterpiece of a parable

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