Regular price: £26.09
Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria. When their father has to work away, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river they encounter a madman, who predicts that one of the brothers will kill another. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact will transcend the lives and imaginations of both its characters and its readers.
Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, narrated by Dominic Hoffman.
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery, one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow.
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....
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
Back when they were students, Simon and his friend, Ray, had dreams to become rock stars. Fifteen years later their mid-30s are bearing down fast, and they're having to accept a less glamorous life. Ray takes refuge from his responsibilities by living a virtual existence in online games. People say he needs to grow up, but everybody finds their own way of coping. But for Simon it's serial murder, mass slaughter and professional assassination.
Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. When her in-laws insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. It will lead to jealousy, betrayal and despair. Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of '80s Nigeria, Stay with Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Ayobami Adebayo weaves a devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood.
Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria. When their father has to work away, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river they encounter a madman, who predicts that one of the brothers will kill another. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact will transcend the lives and imaginations of both its characters and its readers.
Penguin presents the unabridged downloadable audiobook edition of Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, narrated by Dominic Hoffman.
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery, one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow.
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....
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans, and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
Back when they were students, Simon and his friend, Ray, had dreams to become rock stars. Fifteen years later their mid-30s are bearing down fast, and they're having to accept a less glamorous life. Ray takes refuge from his responsibilities by living a virtual existence in online games. People say he needs to grow up, but everybody finds their own way of coping. But for Simon it's serial murder, mass slaughter and professional assassination.
Yejide is hoping for a miracle, for a child. When her in-laws insist upon a new wife, it is too much for Yejide to bear. It will lead to jealousy, betrayal and despair. Unravelling against the social and political turbulence of '80s Nigeria, Stay with Me sings with the voices, colours, joys and fears of its surroundings. Ayobami Adebayo weaves a devastating story of the fragility of married love, the undoing of family, the wretchedness of grief and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood.
Ai-Ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao's ascent to the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a history of revolutionary idealism, music and silence, in which three musicians - the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow; the violin prodigy, Zhuli; and the enigmatic pianist, Kai - struggle during China's relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to.
'Ma, I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using. I am so bloated that I feel I cannot breathe any more. I am leaving to find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given me and make my own. I feel I live in a borrowed house. It’s time to find my own… Forgive me…’ Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in extremist political activism.
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery, or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
Having signed up for the US Army in the 1850s, aged barely 17, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and ultimately the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in, they find these days to be vivid. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past.
When Weston Babansky receives an extravagant engagement present from his best friend (and old flame), Jillian Frisk, he doesn't quite know what to make of it - or how to get it past his fiancée. Especially as it's a massive, handmade, intensely personal sculpture that they'd have to live with forever. As the argument rages about whether Jillian's gift was an act of pure platonic generosity or something more insidious, battle lines are drawn....
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.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is an immensely powerful and heartbreaking novel of brotherly love and the limits of human endurance. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success and pride.
Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, read by Kimberly Farr. A mother comes to visit her daughter in hospital after having not seen her in many years.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin but spent most of his life living with Nora Barnacle in various parts of Europe. Apart from a collection of verse, Dubliners was his first published work in 1914. In Dubliners, Joyce portrays quite brilliantly human relationships in Ireland at the turn of the century. His characters are so vital and exciting and the stories so fresh, evocative, and entertaining that they could well have been written today.
Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, great explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies, Beatles memorabilia, miniature cacti and coral. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks, his inward journey towards some kind of peace takes him on an odyssey through the five boroughs of New York, as he attempts to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet....
Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee - a girl who inherited her mother's bright-blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt, and Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to hold someone accountable. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who may be the only one who knows what really happened.
London 1893: When Cora Seaborne and her son Francis reach Essex, rumours spread from further up the estuary that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming lives, has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced that it may be a previously undiscovered species. As she sets out on its trail she meets William Ransome, Aldwinter's vicar.
The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in search of a new life.
Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep has a visa wife in a flat on the other side of town. And Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar.
Very well written story about a part of our society we rather forget about. This book has given a voice to illegal immigrants living in the shadows. Highly recommended read.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful
This lengthy audiobook really makes you think about those desperate illegal 'runaways', exploited by loan sharks and escaping from the country of their birth to find a better life in England. That sounds like a polemical novel, but it's not that, it's a deeply compassionate, coruscating story of three young Indian men - Tochi, Randeep and Avtar - who are willing to suffer hideous hardship, intense loneliness and exploitation in order to work, work, work for a better life and support their families back 'home'.
These three men live in a squalid house in Sheffield with nine other Indian migrants, and the first part of the audiobook fills out their back stories in India. The details are filmic and vivid, and the characters burst out, helped by Sartaj Garewal's fluent narration and capture of accents. Tochi, an Untouchable in Bihar, finally manages to hire a rickshaw and scrapes a living as its driver to support his family after his father loses both arms in an accident. That is until atrocious massacres engulf his family and he is left with nothing. Randeep works nights in a bleak call centre and married troubled, British-born Narinder previously unknown to him in order to get into Britain. Avtar is told to 'follow the others' away from 'this benighted country' if he is to stand a chance of a better life - and sells one of his kidneys to help pay the loan sharks to finance his journey.
In England, their lives are grindingly harsh. They struggle to find work which will pay them a fraction of the minimum wage on hazardous construction sites, in factories and fast food outlets. They must earn enough to feed themselves - badly - and send money home to support their families and pay off the loan sharks. When Avtar is crippled with pain from complications following his kidney removal, he's too terrified to go to the doctor: discovery and police raids are a constant fear. But despite the undeniable misery of these men's lives, there is tremendous energy and vitality. It raises huge issues - made the more pertinent considering the vast numbers of refugees and migrants who have poured into Europe since this book was published in the summer - but never preaches or polemicizes. The message is in all the searing details.
Listen to it - your eyes will be opened and won't shut again.
28 of 29 people found this review helpful
A tightly woven, intimate and accomplished portrayal of little known but significant lives, spanning continents.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful
Would you listen to The Year of the Runaways again? Why?
Yes. Epic stories are always worth a few more listens/reads. Plus, I listen while I travel, cook, garden or do housework and sometimes might miss the key aspect of a particular scene.
What did you like best about this story?
Everything. It is a believable story. I grew up in the Midlands in a city with a diverse Indian community. I had Indian friends at school and have worked with Indians of different castes and the Indian culture has always fascinated me. So much so that as a child I enjoyed watching Indian films and series (if subtitled).
Which scene did you most enjoy?
I am interested in the plight of Untouchables and so was interested in the experiences of Tochi.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
This novel is full of moving moments. It was educative and immersive. As one who listens to talk radio and is saturated with anti-immigrant talk, I was reminded that illegal immigrants are human and do not risk life and limb and dehumanisation to access benefits.
Any additional comments?
Since listening to the book, I read Sunjeev Sahota's interview in The Guardian (12th December 2015). What a wonderful and empathic human being. A son any mother would be proud of.
18 of 19 people found this review helpful
Moving description of the challenges of Indian migration to the UK... it offers insights into people smuggling, the caste system and exploitation by unscrupulous employers and landlords. This novel, shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, is powerful, beautifully written and compulsive reading.
Indian migrants, many illegal, seek opportunities in the UK, hoping to remit funds to their families back home. The challenges they face include poverty and racism, alongside dual loyalties to family, newfound friends, and marriages of convenience. Written and narrated with empathy, it is rich with vivid insights into culture, cuisine, and dress. The hardship and sacrifice are all too apparent; migrants working on a building site, restaurant kitchen, or drawn into petty (or not so petty) crime will not look the same again.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
Enlightening story. Difficult to follow at times as constantly changing characters stories and going backward and forward in time.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
The Year of the Runaways - mixed feelings about this book
I enjoyed the beginning of book going through the characters stories, but then it got s bit jumbled up & seemed to have lost what was going on with the characters themselves, it became a bit unbelievable .
Good narration by Sartaj Garewal
11 of 14 people found this review helpful
This is a great insight into Indian culture, although I am still baffled by a lot of the words.and terminology.
It's s little confusing at the start and took s while to draw me in, but none the less a good story.
I loved listening to mr Garewall narrating he really immersed the listener in the smells, sounds and life of these unfortunate people. After long listens I even found myself wanting to talk in a singsong Indian accent!
The story of the illegal immigrants is both harrowing as it is important to tell and I am very thankful that I am born into my comfortable life.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
An eye opener into the world of the Indian immigrant in the UK. I thought the characters were well rounded and there was humour despite the bareness of their lives. I feel educated as well as entertained by this book and Sartaj Garwal's narration is brilliant - his ability with accents delineates the characters clearly.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
an eye opener of a story following 3 Indian men coming to England to find their fortune. and the woman who made it possible. Heartbreaking yet enlightening... unputdownable.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful