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Jubilee

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Jubilee

By: Shelley Harris
Narrated by: Sartaj Garewal
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About this listen

 It's 1977, the day of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, when a photographer captures a moment forever: a festive street party with bunting and Union Jacks fluttering in the breeze and, right in the centre of the frame, a small Asian boy staring intensely at the camera. The photo becomes infamous when it is adopted as a symbol of everything that is great and good about Britain, but what is the real story behind it? Relationships between the neighbours on Cherry Gardens are far from easy, and minor frictions threaten to erupt as the street party begins...

Fast forward to the present and that boy, Satish, is now a successful paediatric heart surgeon, saving lives and families every single day. But he's living with a secret - he's addicted to controlled prescription drugs. A message about a proposed reunion of the children in the photograph throws his life into turmoil as he thinks back to Jubilee Day, and the events that changed his life for ever.

Read by Sartaj Garewal

(p) 2012 Orion Publishing Group©2011 Shelley Harris Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction
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Jubilee is about a photograph taken during a Silver Jubilee street party in 1977. The photograph is populated by white families but it also features a smiling Asian boy, Satish, the protagonist of the story.

The photograph becomes iconic - an example of "Multicultural Britain", and later a punk band (think the Sex Pistols or the Clash) use the photograph on their album cover, further immortalising the image.

30 years later the now famous photographer, wants to recreate the photo that launched his career, using the original `cast'.

But Satish, now a successful paediatric cardiologist, is reluctant to take part, and as the story unfolds we learn why.

For Satish that Jubilee day wasn't as joyous an event as it appeared to be in the picture.

Whilst the concept of telling the 'real story' behind the photo is an interesting one, the novel itself is lacking in pace and was problematic for me. It is very well narrated and there are some good examples of the cultural missteps that were happening in Britain during the late 70s but the story itself is very slow and the chapters set in the present lacked depth and verged on boring at times.

Other reviews I have read said the reveal of what happened to Satish on that Jubilee day was an anticlimax; however I disagree. Sure, worse things happen in crime novels etc. but that doesn't lessen the awfulness of what happened to the young Satish in this story. Perhaps the structure and the more drawn out parts of the book lessened the impact of the incidents for other readers.

Ultimately this story had huge potential but turned out to be disappointing. It felt as though it had been padded out in places to meet the word count requirement of a novel and would have probably been more gripping and better paced as a short story or a novella.

Some parts were good but it wasn't a compelling listen.

Good Premise but not a Gripping Listen

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I bought it on a 2 for 1 sale. But 'Jubilee' is certainly far from being a half-creditworthy listen.
It's a multi-layered, well-balanced, sensibly written story with memorable characters. An excellent prose with wity vocabulary and very original syntactic solutions. An utterly courageous prose as well, with authentic language of the 70's. The narration is superbe.
I'm looking forward to hear some more about Mrs. Harris. Well done!

Jhumpa Lahiri Is The American Shelley Harris

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