Listen free for 30 days
-
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories
- Narrated by: Emilia Fox, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged Audiobook
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Anthologies & Short Stories
Add to basket failed.
Add to wishlist failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Listen with a free trial
Buy Now for £21.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Revenge
- Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors
- By: Tom Bower
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 16 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The British Royal Family believed that the dizzy success of the Sussex wedding, watched and celebrated around the world, was the beginning of a new era for the Windsors. Yet, within one tumultuous year, the dream became a nightmare. In the aftermath of the infamous Megxit split and the Oprah Winfrey interview, the Royal Family's fate seems persistently threatened.
-
-
Better than most fiction
- By 451 on 21-07-22
-
Case Histories
- Jackson Brodie
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Susan Jameson
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet--"lost" on the left, "found" on the right--and the two never seem to balance. Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge and has a failed marriage to prove it.
-
-
Returned half way through.
- By Susan on 07-07-19
-
Exposure
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Emma Fenney
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By the Sunday Times best-selling author of The Lie. Forbidden love, intimate betrayal and the devastating power of exposure drive Helen Dunmore's remarkable new title. London, November 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets and arrested.
-
-
Heartstopping and addictive
- By Kindle Customer on 27-03-16
-
Burning Bright
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nadine, a 16-year-old runaway new to the city, is set up in a decaying Georgian house by her Finnish lover, Kai. Slowly she begins to suspect that Kai and his partner, Tony, have plans for her that have nothing to do with love. "Be careful", warns Enid, a sitting tenant in the house, whose own tragic past means that she knows all about survival. When Nadine discovers that she has been groomed for renting out to a government minister with special tastes, Enid's warning takes on a prophetic quality.
-
-
Great book, great narrator
- By Katie on 23-12-12
-
Oh William!
- Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
- By: Elizabeth Strout
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband—and long-time, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.
-
-
A simple slice of life?
- By JennyJoJo Hooper on 18-02-22
-
House of Orphans
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Finland, 1901. Eeva, the young orphaned daughter of a revolutionary, is sent from the orphanage to work as housekeeper for Thomas, a widowed country doctor. Her enigmatic presence disturbs Thomas as much as it fascinates him, shattering all the certainties of his life. Eeva longs to be back in Helsinki with the comrades of her childhood, particularly Lauri. But life there is full of danger.
-
-
My book of the year. Outstanding in every way.
- By EGS on 18-04-15
-
Revenge
- Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors
- By: Tom Bower
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 16 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The British Royal Family believed that the dizzy success of the Sussex wedding, watched and celebrated around the world, was the beginning of a new era for the Windsors. Yet, within one tumultuous year, the dream became a nightmare. In the aftermath of the infamous Megxit split and the Oprah Winfrey interview, the Royal Family's fate seems persistently threatened.
-
-
Better than most fiction
- By 451 on 21-07-22
-
Case Histories
- Jackson Brodie
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Susan Jameson
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cambridge is sweltering, during an unusually hot summer. To Jackson Brodie, former police inspector turned private investigator, the world consists of one accounting sheet--"lost" on the left, "found" on the right--and the two never seem to balance. Jackson has never felt at home in Cambridge and has a failed marriage to prove it.
-
-
Returned half way through.
- By Susan on 07-07-19
-
Exposure
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Emma Fenney
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By the Sunday Times best-selling author of The Lie. Forbidden love, intimate betrayal and the devastating power of exposure drive Helen Dunmore's remarkable new title. London, November 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets and arrested.
-
-
Heartstopping and addictive
- By Kindle Customer on 27-03-16
-
Burning Bright
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nadine, a 16-year-old runaway new to the city, is set up in a decaying Georgian house by her Finnish lover, Kai. Slowly she begins to suspect that Kai and his partner, Tony, have plans for her that have nothing to do with love. "Be careful", warns Enid, a sitting tenant in the house, whose own tragic past means that she knows all about survival. When Nadine discovers that she has been groomed for renting out to a government minister with special tastes, Enid's warning takes on a prophetic quality.
-
-
Great book, great narrator
- By Katie on 23-12-12
-
Oh William!
- Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
- By: Elizabeth Strout
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband—and long-time, on-again-off-again friend and confidante. Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.
-
-
A simple slice of life?
- By JennyJoJo Hooper on 18-02-22
-
House of Orphans
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Finland, 1901. Eeva, the young orphaned daughter of a revolutionary, is sent from the orphanage to work as housekeeper for Thomas, a widowed country doctor. Her enigmatic presence disturbs Thomas as much as it fascinates him, shattering all the certainties of his life. Eeva longs to be back in Helsinki with the comrades of her childhood, particularly Lauri. But life there is full of danger.
-
-
My book of the year. Outstanding in every way.
- By EGS on 18-04-15
-
The Siege
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 10 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leningrad, September 1941. German tanks surround the city, imprisoning those who live there. The besieged people of Leningrad face shells, starvation, and the Russian winter. Interweaving two love affairs in two generations, The Siege draws us deep into the Levin's family struggle to stay alive during this terrible winter.
-
-
Harrowing and deeply moving
- By Kirstine on 08-10-16
-
Birdcage Walk
- By: Helen Dunmore
- Narrated by: Emma Fenney
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is1792 and Europe is seized by political turmoil and violence. Lizzie Fawkes has grown up in radical circles where each step of the French Revolution is followed with eager idealism. But she has recently married John Diner Tredevant, a property developer who is heavily invested in Bristol's housing boom, and he has everything to lose from social upheaval and the prospect of war. Diner believes that Lizzie's independent, questioning spirit must be coerced and subdued. She belongs to him.
-
-
Wonderful story and characters
- By WomanOnTheVerge on 24-08-17
-
The Island of Missing Trees
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Daphne Kouma, Amira Ghazalla
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. The taverna is the only place that Kostas and Defne can meet in secret, hidden beneath the blackened beams from which hang garlands of garlic and chilli peppers, creeping honeysuckle, and in the centre, growing through a cavity in the roof, a fig tree. The fig tree witnesses their hushed, happy meetings; their silent, surreptitious departures. The fig tree is there, too, when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, when the teenagers vanish.
-
-
Narrators are horrible
- By idyll on 16-08-21
-
Small Things Like These
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 1 hr and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church. The long-awaited new work from the author of Foster, Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.
-
-
At last!! A novel by Claire Keegan :)
- By marianna c. on 29-10-21
-
Hamnet
- Winner of The Women's Prize for Fiction 2020 - the No. 1 Bestseller
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Daisy Donovan
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.
-
-
Narrator fights writing and wins (sadly)
- By Leaf Green on 20-07-20
-
Girl, Woman, Other
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the 20th century to the teens of the 21st, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of 12 characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope....
-
-
Good story but distracting narration
- By Booklover on 21-11-19
-
The German Boy
- By: Tricia Wastvedt
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1947, Elisabeth Mander’s German nephew comes to stay: Stefan Landau, her dead sister’s teenage son, whom she hates and loves before she’s even set eyes on him. Orphaned by the war and traumatised by the last vicious battles of the Hitler Youth, Stefan brings with him to England only a few meagre possessions. Among them a portrait of a girl with long copper hair by a young painter called Michael Ross - and with it the memory, both painful and precious, of her life and that time between the wars.
-
Still Life
- By: Sarah Winman
- Narrated by: Sarah Winman
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1944, in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening. Ulysses Temper is a young British soldier; Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the wreckage and relive memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.
-
-
A gentle story of love and Florence
- By V. O'Regan on 04-06-21
-
The Silent Patient
- By: Alex Michaelides
- Narrated by: Louise Brealey, Jack Hawkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Silent Patient is a shocking psychological thriller of a woman's act of violence against her husband - and of the man obsessed with uncovering her motive.... Famous artist Alicia Berenson shoots her husband in the head five times and then never speaks again. Five years later, forensic psychotherapist Theo Faber must find a way to get Alicia to talk if he wants to treat her. Only then can he unravel the shocking events of that tragic night five years before....
-
-
What a journey..
- By julia arthur on 18-02-19
-
A Slipping Down Life
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Deborah McBride
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Penguin presents the audio edition of A Slipping Down Life by Anne Tyler. In a small Southern town teenager Evie Decker becomes obsessed with local rock singer Bertram 'Drumstrings' Casey and decides to take her life into her own hands. When she carves his name on her forehead their two lives become unforgettably entwined in this remarkable novel.
-
Noah’s Compass
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anne Tyler's new novel tells the story of a year in the life of Liam Pennywell, a man in his 61st year. A classical pedant, he's just been 'let go' from his schoolteaching job and downsizes to a tiny out-of-town apartment, where he goes to bed early and alone on his first night. Widowed, re-married, divorced, and the father of three daughters, Liam is a man who is proud of his recall but has learned to dodge issues and skirt adventure. An unpleasant event occurs, though, to jolt him out of his certainty.
-
-
Brilliant family drama
- By Shoeless on 27-01-15
-
Clock Dance
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life: when she was 11 and her mother disappeared, being proposed to at 21, the accident that would make her a widow at 41. At each of these moments, Willa ended up on a path laid out for her by others. So when she receives a phone call telling her that her son’s ex-girlfriend has been shot and needs her help, she drops everything and flies across the country. The spur-of-the moment decision to look after this woman - and her nine-year-old daughter, and her dog - will lead Willa into uncharted territory....
-
-
I wish this book went on forever
- By Tor on 19-08-18
Summary
Random House presents the audiobook edition of Girl, Balancing & Other Stories, by Helen Dunmore.
Haunting, uplifting, beautiful: the final work from Helen Dunmore.
Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives:
A girl alone, stretching her meagre budget to feed herself, becomes aware that the young man who has come to see her may not be as friendly as he seems.
Two women from very different backgrounds enjoy an unusual night out, finding solace in laughter and an unexpected friendship.
A young man picks up his infant son and goes outside into a starlit night as he makes a decision that will inform the rest of his life.
A woman imprisoned for her religion examines her faith in a seemingly literal and quietly original way.
This brilliant collection of Helen Dunmore’s short fiction, replete with her penetrating insight into the human condition, is certain to delight and move all her listeners.
More from the same
What listeners say about Girl, Balancing & Other Stories
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Jennifer Jefferson
- 06-09-18
Good
I enjoyed the tales, and generally well performed.
It was rushed between the end of one story and the beginning of another, so much so that it was sometimes difficult to know that another one had begun. Rather spoiled it.
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Susan D
- 20-10-20
Tedious
Lots of boring little stories with unfinished endings. It will pass a few hours during lockdown but there can be few other times when you would want to waste listening time