Listen free for 30 days
-
The Bass Rock
- Narrated by: Julie Graham, Kirsty Strain, Ross Anderson
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
People who bought this also bought...
-
Summerwater
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Morven Christie
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the longest day of the summer, 12 people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. The endless rain leaves them with little to do but watch the other residents. A woman goes running up the Ben as if fleeing; a retired couple reminisces about neighbours long since moved on; a teenage boy braves the dark waters of the loch in his red kayak. Each person is wrapped in their own cares but increasingly alert to the makeshift community around them.
-
-
Thoughts for our fractured times - brilliant
- By Rachel Redford on 29-08-20
-
After the Fire, a Still Small Voice
- By: Evie Wyld
- Narrated by: David Tredinnick
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbours and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War.
-
-
After The Book a warm glow
- By holly bird on 03-05-14
-
Hamnet
- 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
-
Thin Places
- By: Kerri ni Dochartaigh
- Narrated by: Kerri ni Dochartaigh
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A breathtaking mix of memoir, nature writing and history: this is Kerri ní Dochartaigh's story of a wild Ireland, an invisible border, an old conflict and the healing power of the natural world. Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side
-
-
Not for me
- By DFC on 30-01-21
-
Luckenbooth
- By: Jenni Fagan
- Narrated by: Cathleen McCarron, David McCallion, Fiona McNeill, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Stories tucked away on every floor. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is an archetypal Edinburgh tenement. The devil’s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910, and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century.
-
-
Fantastically dark.
- By Helen L. on 25-01-21
-
The Prophets
- By: Robert Jones Jr.
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this blinding debut, Robert Jones Jr blends the lyricism of Toni Morrison with the vivid prose of Zora Neale Hurston to characterise the forceful, enduring bond of love and what happens when brutality threatens the purest form of serenity. The Halifax plantation is known as Empty by the slaves who work it under the pitiless gaze of its overseers and its owner, Massa Paul. Two young enslaved men, Samuel and Isaiah, dwell among the animals they keep in the barn, helping out in the fields when their day is done. But the barn is their haven, a space of radiance and love.
-
-
a MUST read ....
- By Sally Margulies on 15-02-21
-
Summerwater
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Morven Christie
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the longest day of the summer, 12 people sit cooped up with their families in a faded Scottish cabin park. The endless rain leaves them with little to do but watch the other residents. A woman goes running up the Ben as if fleeing; a retired couple reminisces about neighbours long since moved on; a teenage boy braves the dark waters of the loch in his red kayak. Each person is wrapped in their own cares but increasingly alert to the makeshift community around them.
-
-
Thoughts for our fractured times - brilliant
- By Rachel Redford on 29-08-20
-
After the Fire, a Still Small Voice
- By: Evie Wyld
- Narrated by: David Tredinnick
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frank and Leon are two men from different times, discovering that sometimes all you learn from your parents' mistakes is how to make different ones of your own. Frank is trying to escape his troubled past by running away to his family's beach shack. As he struggles to make friends with his neighbours and their precocious young daughter, Sal, he discovers the community has fresh wounds of its own. A girl is missing, and when Sal too disappears, suspicion falls on Frank. Decades earlier, Leon tries to hold together his family's cake shop as their suburban life crumbles in the aftermath of the Korean War.
-
-
After The Book a warm glow
- By holly bird on 03-05-14
-
Hamnet
- 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
-
Thin Places
- By: Kerri ni Dochartaigh
- Narrated by: Kerri ni Dochartaigh
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A breathtaking mix of memoir, nature writing and history: this is Kerri ní Dochartaigh's story of a wild Ireland, an invisible border, an old conflict and the healing power of the natural world. Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side
-
-
Not for me
- By DFC on 30-01-21
-
Luckenbooth
- By: Jenni Fagan
- Narrated by: Cathleen McCarron, David McCallion, Fiona McNeill, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Stories tucked away on every floor. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close is an archetypal Edinburgh tenement. The devil’s daughter rows to the shores of Leith in a coffin. The year is 1910, and she has been sent to a tenement building in Edinburgh by her recently deceased father to bear a child for a wealthy man and his fiancée. The harrowing events that follow lead to a curse on the building and its residents - a curse that will last for the rest of the century.
-
-
Fantastically dark.
- By Helen L. on 25-01-21
-
The Prophets
- By: Robert Jones Jr.
- Narrated by: Karen Chilton
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this blinding debut, Robert Jones Jr blends the lyricism of Toni Morrison with the vivid prose of Zora Neale Hurston to characterise the forceful, enduring bond of love and what happens when brutality threatens the purest form of serenity. The Halifax plantation is known as Empty by the slaves who work it under the pitiless gaze of its overseers and its owner, Massa Paul. Two young enslaved men, Samuel and Isaiah, dwell among the animals they keep in the barn, helping out in the fields when their day is done. But the barn is their haven, a space of radiance and love.
-
-
a MUST read ....
- By Sally Margulies on 15-02-21
-
Leave the World Behind
- By: Rumaan Alam
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and - with nowhere else to turn - they have come to the country in search of shelter.
-
-
best book ever!!
- By Amazon Customer on 16-12-20
-
Burnt Sugar
- By: Avni Doshi
- Narrated by: Vineeta Rishi
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents) and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid's wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
-
-
I didn't enjoy it
- By TheRealMrsB on 16-09-20
-
Weather
- By: Jenny Offill
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 3 hrs and 46 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, 'Hell and High Water', and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization.
-
-
Brilliant and strange
- By Huskyaddict on 25-06-20
-
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
- By: Deepa Anappara
- Narrated by: Indira Varma, Himesh Patel, Antonio Aakeel
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When a boy at school goes missing, Jai decides to use the crime-solving skills he has picked up from episodes of Police Patrol to find him. With Pari and Faiz by his side, Jai ventures into some of the most dangerous parts of the sprawling Indian city, the bazaar at night, and even the railway station at the end of the Purple Line. But kids continue to vanish, and the trio must confront terrified parents, an indifferent police force and soul-snatching djinns in order to uncover the truth.
-
-
A Powerful Novel Giving Voice to the Children
- By Vivienne on 01-02-20
-
Memorial
- By: Bryan Washington
- Narrated by: Bryan Washington, Kotabe Akie
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Benson and Mike are two young guys who live together in Houston. Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years - good years - but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye.
-
-
ok. not likeable characters or writing style
- By Anonymous User on 23-01-21
-
Mayflies
- By: Andrew O'Hagan
- Narrated by: Andrew O'Hagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life. In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.
-
-
Oh my word
- By Diane P. on 03-12-20
-
The Push
- By: Ashley Audrain
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blythe Connor doesn't want history to repeat itself. Violet is her first child and she will give her daughter all the love she deserves. All the love that her own mother withheld. But firstborns are never easy. And Violet is demanding and fretful. She never smiles. Soon Blythe believes she can do no right - that something's very wrong. Either with her daughter, or herself. Her husband, Fox, says she's imagining it. But Violet's different with him. And he can't understand what Blythe suffered as a child. No one can. Blythe wants to be a good mother.
-
-
Superior in every way beautifully written
- By Janet biglari on 10-01-21
-
All the Birds, Singing
- By: Evie Wyld
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jake Whyte is the sole resident of an old farmhouse on an unnamed British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds. It’s just her, her untamed companion, Dog, and a flock of sheep. Which is how she wanted it to be. But something is coming for the sheep – every few nights it picks one off, leaves it in rags.
-
-
Annoyingly incomplete and woeful accents!
- By Mick B. on 17-08-14
-
Magpie Lane
- By: Lucy Atkins
- Narrated by: Susie Riddell
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging - an eerie and ancient house - a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother.
-
-
Really fresh and original
- By Rachel Redford on 02-05-20
-
Light Perpetual
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young lives are atomised in an instant. November 1944. That rocket never lands. A single second in time is altered and five young lives go on - to experience all the unimaginable changes of the 20th century. Because maybe there are always other futures. Other chances.
-
-
Bad narration
- By Mr Consumer on 15-02-21
-
The Art of Falling
- By: Danielle McLaughlin
- Narrated by: Tara Flynn
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nessa McCormack's marriage is coming back together again after her husband's affair. She is excited to be in charge of a retrospective art exhibit for one of Ireland's most beloved and enigmatic artists, the late sculptor Robert Locke. But the arrival of two outsiders imperils both her personal and professional worlds: a chance encounter with an old friend threatens to expose a betrayal Nessa thought she had long put behind her, and at work, an odd woman comes forward claiming to be the true creator of Robert Locke's most famous work, The Chalk Sculpture.
-
Sisters
- By: Daisy Johnson
- Narrated by: Daisy Edgar-Jones, Anna Koval
- Length: 4 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After a serious case of school bullying becomes too much to bear, sisters July and September move across the country with their mother to a long-abandoned family home. In their new and unsettling surroundings, July finds that the deep bond she has always had with September - a closeness that not even their mother is allowed to penetrate - is starting to change in ways she cannot entirely understand. Inside the house the tension among the three women builds, while outside the sisters meet a boy who tests the limits of their shared experiences.
-
-
Sisters
- By Ms N Murphy on 27-10-20
Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
The lives of three women weave together across four centuries in the dazzling new book from Evie Wyld, a Granta Best of Young British Novelist.
Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries borne witness to the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries, the fates of three women are inextricably linked to this place and to each other.
Sarah, accused of being a witch, is fleeing for her life.
Ruth, in the aftermath of the Second World War, is navigating a new marriage and the strange waters of the local community.
Six decades later, Viv, still mourning the death of her father, is cataloguing Ruth’s belongings in the now-empty house.
As each woman’s story unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that their choices are circumscribed, in ways big and small, by the men who seek to control them. But in sisterhood there is also the possibility of survival and a new way of life. Intricately crafted and compulsively listenable, The Bass Rock burns bright with anger and heart - a devastating indictment of the violence that men have inflicted on women throughout the ages.
More from the same
What listeners say about The Bass Rock
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- P P-G
- 03-05-20
Absolutely TERRIBLE narration of Ruth’s chapters
The narration of Ruth’s chapters were so appalling, it completely ruined this book for me
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 29-06-20
Great Ending
I read reviews of this book that complained about the sudden ending with no neat tying together of the threads. I thought it was great. This is a story about a place, and what has happened there not so much about resolving the people’s stories. If you have ever sat under an ancient oak and wondered who had sheltered there and what had happened, this is for you.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ms Hilary Thornton
- 16-06-20
Directionless
I found the plot needlessly confusing and rather thin. There was an attempt at a sort of mythic poeticism but it fell short of that.
The characters, apart from Mrs Hamilton, were disappointingly ordinary.
I could see what the author was trying to achieve with the rock at its centre, but, for me, it wasn’t realised.
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Joe Kelliher
- 19-02-21
Beautifully written and narrated
This is one of the most beautifully written novels I have read for some time. The eloquence and sensitivity of the language stands out. The story is really engaging. Reading a novel is so rewarding when you find a writer who can provide insights into human behaviour.
So well read by the performers.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- LP
- 18-02-21
Probably best to be experienced on the printed page.
I need to order a copy of this novel. It moves from one character to another - most of whom are linked - but I never fully grasped how all of them were connected. Evie Wyld was recommended by William Boyd (in a podcast) and he said that she moves between time frames in the same way he constructs his novels. I’m certainly impressed by her writing and story line and look forward to to rereading this novel and exploring her others. I was not impressed by the narrator for Ruth. She read in as flat tone and ran sentences into one another in a way that lost meaning. However the other narrators were ok.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Ingibjorg
- 01-11-20
Very good but Ruth narrator realky bad at accents
Very good novel but the narrator who did the Ruth sections is terribly bad at doing accents (Weksh, Scots), which ruined it a bit for me.