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Kate Tempest is one of the most exciting and innovative performers to have emerged in spoken-word poetry in many years; her dramatic poem "Brand New Ancients" won the prestigious Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry. Tempest's wholly unique blend of street poetry, rap, and storytelling - combined with the spellbinding delivery of an open-air revivalist - has won her legions of followers all over the UK. Her remarkable stage presence is wholly audible in this poem, a spoken story written to be told with live music.
Kate Tempest's first full-length collection for Picador is an ambitious, multi-voiced work based around the mythical figure of Tiresias. This four-part work follows him through his transformations from child, man and woman to blind prophet; through this structure, Tempest holds up a mirror to contemporary life in a direct and provocative way rarely associated with poetry.
Like all 20-year-olds, Ryan Cusack is trying to get his head around who he is. This is not a good time for his boss to exploit his dual heritage by opening a new black market route from Italy to Ireland. It is certainly not a good time for his adored girlfriend to decide he's irreparably corrupted. And he really wishes he hadn't accidentally caught the eye of an ornery grandmother who fancies herself his saviour.
Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world....
'She throws her head back and pushes her chest forward and lets go a huge blast right into the centre of his body. The rivulets and streams of red scarring run across his chest and up around his throat. She'd put her hand on his heart and stopped him dead.' Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death.
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.
Kate Tempest is one of the most exciting and innovative performers to have emerged in spoken-word poetry in many years; her dramatic poem "Brand New Ancients" won the prestigious Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry. Tempest's wholly unique blend of street poetry, rap, and storytelling - combined with the spellbinding delivery of an open-air revivalist - has won her legions of followers all over the UK. Her remarkable stage presence is wholly audible in this poem, a spoken story written to be told with live music.
Kate Tempest's first full-length collection for Picador is an ambitious, multi-voiced work based around the mythical figure of Tiresias. This four-part work follows him through his transformations from child, man and woman to blind prophet; through this structure, Tempest holds up a mirror to contemporary life in a direct and provocative way rarely associated with poetry.
Like all 20-year-olds, Ryan Cusack is trying to get his head around who he is. This is not a good time for his boss to exploit his dual heritage by opening a new black market route from Italy to Ireland. It is certainly not a good time for his adored girlfriend to decide he's irreparably corrupted. And he really wishes he hadn't accidentally caught the eye of an ornery grandmother who fancies herself his saviour.
Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live. Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world....
'She throws her head back and pushes her chest forward and lets go a huge blast right into the centre of his body. The rivulets and streams of red scarring run across his chest and up around his throat. She'd put her hand on his heart and stopped him dead.' Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death.
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.
Anna Kerrigan, nearly 12 years old, accompanies her father to the house of a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Anna observes the uniformed servants, the lavishing of toys on the children and some secret pact between her father and Dexter Styles. Years later her father has disappeared, and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men.
The brilliant new novel from the author of the New York Times best seller Everything I Never Told You. Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned - from the layout of the winding roads to the colours of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead.
There were many things that Hollie McNish didn't know before she was pregnant. How her family and friends would react; that Mr Whippy would be off the menu; how quickly ice can melt on a stomach. These were on top of the many other things she didn't know about babies: how to stand while holding one; how to do a poetry gig with your baby as a member of the audience; how drum'n'bass can make a great lullaby. But Hollie learned. And she's still learning, slowly.
Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar, read by Juliet Stevenson. This voyage is special. It will change everything.... One September evening in 1785, the merchant Jonah Hancock hears urgent knocking on his front door. One of his captains is waiting eagerly on the step. He has sold Jonah's ship for what appears to be a mermaid.
Dark, magical and unsettling, Folk is a debut of breathtaking imagination which introduces the remote, unforgiving island of Neverness and its singular inhabitants. Take a torch, the last to be lit, and follow the jostle of fat, spitting lights as the men and women of Neverness spread out along the gorse edge. Every year they gather while the girls shoot their arrows and the boys hunt them out. The air is riddled with spiteful shadows - the wounds and fears and furies of a village year.
It's 1969, and holed up in a grimy tenement building in New York's Lower East Side is a travelling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the date they will die. Four siblings, too young for what they are about to hear, sneak out to hear their fortunes. We then follow the intertwined paths the siblings take over the course of five decades and, in particular, how they choose to live with the supposed knowledge the fortune-teller gave them that day. This is a story about life, mortality and the choices we make.
One for the Trouble: Book Slam, Volume One is the first release from the UK’s premier literary event. Eighteen Book Slam alumni, from household names like Irvine Welsh and William Boyd to newcomers like Kate Tempest and Sophie Woolley, were approached to take a song title for inspiration for a new short story or poem. Some took this literally (Jon McGregor’s moving reimagining of A House’s 'Endless Art', for example); others suggestively....
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.
It begins with a painting won in a raffle: 15 sunflowers, hung on the wall by a woman who believes that men and boys are capable of beautiful things. And then there are two boys, Ellis and Michael, who couldn't be closer. And the boys become men, and then they meet Annie, and it changes nothing and everything. Tin Man sees Sarah Winman follow the acclaimed success of When God Was a Rabbit and A Year of Marvellous Ways with a love letter to human kindness and friendship, loss and living.
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the End of Days, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. She spent her summers bottling peaches and her winters rotating emergency supplies, hoping that when the World of Men failed, her family would continue on, unaffected. She hadn't been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she'd never set foot in a classroom and no medical records because her father didn't believe in doctors or hospitals. According to the state and federal government, she didn't exist.
One night an 18-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man - a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery, set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up.
Comedy, Tragedy, Therapy. Simon Amstell did his first stand-up gig at the age of 13. His parents had just divorced, and puberty was confusing. Trying to be funny solved everything. Read by Simon Amstell, and interspersed with footage from his stand-up tours, HELP is the hilarious and heartbreaking account of Simon's ongoing compulsion to reveal his entire self onstage. To tell the truth so it can't hurt him anymore. Loneliness, anxiety, depression - this book has it all. And more.
The Sunday Times best seller.
Award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest's electrifying debut novel takes us into the beating heart of the capital in this multigenerational tale of drugs, desire and belonging.
It gets into your bones. You don't even realise it until you're driving through it, watching all the things you've always known and leaving them behind.
Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are leaving town in a fourth-hand Ford Cortina with a suitcase full of money. They are running from jealous boyfriends, dead-end jobs, violent maniacs and disgruntled drug dealers, in the hope of escaping the restless tedium of life in Southeast London - the place they have always called home.
As the story moves back in time, to before they had to leave, we see them torn between confidence and self-loathing, between loneliness and desire, between desperate ambition and the terrifying prospect of getting nothing done.
In The Bricks That Built the Houses, Kate Tempest explores contemporary city life with a powerful moral microscope, giving us irresistible stories of hidden lives and showing us how the best intentions don't always lead to the right decisions.
Cover designed by Greg Heinimann.
Would you consider the audio edition of The Bricks That Built the Houses to be better than the print version?
Yes - Kate's reading is part of the lyrical mastery of this production. Her delivery and character portrayal are just outstanding.
Which scene did you most enjoy?
Pete's birthday at the pub, becasue it is the perfect climax to the setup.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
So many moments that moved me! Her character portraits are mu favourite thing about her writing.
Any additional comments?
I honestly think that listening to Kate Tempest is like what it must have been listening to Shakespear at the time - her word economy, and detailed picture painting is phenomenal. This is an unpredictable and exciting first novel which I inhaled as it was so good.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful
I have been obsessed with this book ever since listening to “everybody down” it feels like my understanding has been has been expanded and I have seen the same scenes from different angles. Anything by Kate is gold and the fact she reads it herself makes it so much better.
I was sad when this finished. Kate Tempest is a great story teller and her narration is great.
Taking the basic storyline from 'Everybody Down, Tempests album, expanding the story, filling out the characters and making small but important changes.
One of the major strengths of this book are the rich and evocative characters, filled out in descriptor's, and Joycean expositions of their inner landscapes. Though circulating primarily around a group of twenty something young people, great care is paid in building images of their parents and full background, how this has played into the inheritance of the central characters, and how historical ancedents have a legacy.
Set in south London on the backdrop of poverty and dreams, Tempests rich and playful use of language makes this book, and her reading of it (more aptly perhaps performance) makes it an act of pure genius.
The Bricks that Built the Houses is amazing. I loved everything about it. I loved the setting, modern-day London. Tempest breathes life into the city and I could practically hear, smell and taste it. I loved the characters as well. They are all wonderfully formed, made of flesh and bone. I loved them all and wanted everything to work out for them. The plot is great as well, gritty and compelling. I really like Tempest’s prose style. The Bricks that Built the Houses is vivid and full of rich detail. I LOVED this book and will gush about it for months to come. Amazing!
Really very good. I enjoyed very much. Highly recommended. Jump in the waters lovely in South London
Would you listen to The Bricks That Built the Houses again? Why?
Excellent plot, writing style and narration
What other book might you compare The Bricks That Built the Houses to, and why?
Excellent plot, writing style and narration
Which character – as performed by Kate Tempest – was your favourite?
Excellent plot, writing style and narration
Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Excellent plot, writing style and narration
Any additional comments?
Excellent plot, writing style and narration
The story, the descriptions, the writing, I loved everything about this book. I think I'll miss the characters in the book I enjoyed it so much. I was so disappointed when it ended. Can't wait to read another novel by Kate Tempest.
Without doubt the best book I have listened to for a very long time
Kate Tempest is a tour de force
Her capacity to conjour her characters and evoke the city is without equal
The story moves like the river Thames itself
If you could sum up The Bricks That Built the Houses in three words, what would they be?
Edgy, piercing, beautiful.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Bricks That Built the Houses?
I personally enjoyed the beginning of the book and its take down of the London elite's culture. She summed it up perfectly.
What does Kate Tempest bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?
Her performance is unique in comparison to any other audiobook I have listened to. Nobody else could have gotten close to expressing the essence of the book than Kate herself (something which isn't always to be taken for granted).
The narrator's accent was grating and distracting. Once you get past the accent the story is beautifully told though. Wonderfully descriptive text.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful