49 h. ago The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood audiobook review – a puzzle waiting to be decoded

Romance, sci-fi and family drama are thrillingly combined in this Booker-winning novel, shared between three narratorsIt’s 25 years since the publication of The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood’s intricately plotted, multi-narrative novel which led to her first Booker prize win. Blending romance, pulpy sci-fi and family drama, it opens with octogenarian Iris Chase Griffen recalling the moment she was told her sister, Laura, had driven off a bridge. The police inform her that two people witnessed Laura deliberately swerve off the road. Though Iris believes this to be true, she insists to the officers that it was an accident.We go on to hear about Iris’s privileged upbringing and marriage of convenience to Richard Griffen, the wealthy owner of a button factory, and her estrangement from her granddaughter with whom she hopes to reconcile. The book also contains excerpts from Laura’s posthumously published novel which features clandestine romantic encounters between an unnamed man – seem...

Politics

9 d. ago Hark by Alice Vincent audiobook review – a search for silence

A former music journalist’s exploration of how we listen is informed by her life-changing experience of motherhoodWhen did you last experience total silence? In Hark, the author Alice Vincent goes to extreme lengths to eradicate noise as she spends time in an anechoic chamber, a heavily soundproofed space designed to swallow up sound waves. There she becomes aware of the noises of her own body, from involuntary swallowing to the soft, high-pitched ringing in her ears. But rather than feel unease, she is “confronted with a comfort I couldn’t have imagined – and a familiarity with quietude I didn’t realise I was living in”.Hark is a book about listening, being heard and the author’s shifting relationship with sound in the early years of motherhood. While working as a music journalist in her 20s, Vincent had been surrounded by noise. But now, in her 30s and plunged into domesticity, she finds herself craving quiet. She also examines how others experience sound, investiga...

Politics

2 w. ago Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan audiobook review – love and conflict in Sri Lanka

The civil war transforms a young trainee doctor’s life as she copes with her feelings for a Tamil Tiger in last year’s Women’s prizewinning novelBrotherless Night opens with 16-year-old Sashi Kulenthiren, who hopes to be a doctor like her eldest brother, making tea when the kettle slips out of her hand, causing her to pour boiling water on herself. When a neighbour, K, hears her screams, he rushes over to help, cracking raw eggs over the scalds to soothe the pain. “So I began as K’s patient though he ended as mine,” Sashi reflects.Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, VV Ganeshananthan’s coming-of-age novel – which won the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction – is an epic and hard-hitting tale of family and survival as it documents life during the civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority that lasted three decades. Before fighting breaks out, Sashi’s most pressing problem is whether she will pass her exams at school. But soon violence and kidnapping become the norm, communities are...

Events

2 w. ago ‘I’m here to open doors’: Bernardine Evaristo on success, controversy and why she plans to donate her £100k award

The Girl, Woman, Other author has this week been awarded a one-off Women’s prize award for her outstanding contribution. She talks about her long road to recognition, and using her profile to support other writersBack in 2013, Bernardine Evaristo gave a reading in a south London bookshop from her novel Mr Loverman. Only six people showed up, a couple of them were dozing and she realised they were homeless people who had come to find somewhere comfortable to sleep. Last month, the hit TV adaptation Mr Loverman, about a 74-year-old gay Caribbean man set in Hackney, east London, won two Baftas, including leading actor for Lennie James, making him the first Black British actor to win the TV award in its 70-year history. “I checked Wikipedia!” Evaristo exclaims of this shocking fact when we meet in London.Evaristo’s long career is one of firsts and creating them for others. In 2019, at the age of 60, she became the first Black woman to win the Booker prize – shared with Margaret Atwood –...

Economics

3 w. ago Brighton Rock by Graham Greene audiobook review – Sam West captures the menace of this modern classic

The seaside town’s seedy underbelly is vividly evoked in this timeless tale of murder, romance and revengeWe are not short of audio versions of Brighton Rock, Graham Greene’s classic thriller from 1938 set in the eponymous seaside town. Past narrators have included Jacob Fortune‑Lloyd, Richard Brown and Tom O’Bedlam, and that’s before you get to the various radio dramatisations. But few can match this narration from the Howards End actor Samuel West, first recorded in 2011, which captures the menace and seediness that runs through Greene’s novel.It tells of 17-year-old Pinkie Brown, a razor-wielding hoodlum who is trying to cover up the murder of a journalist, Charles “Fred” Hale, killed by his gang in revenge for a story he wrote on Pinkie’s now deceased boss, Kite. Pinkie sets about wooing Rose, a naive young waitress who unwittingly saw something that could implicate him in the murder. His plan is to marry her to prevent her testifying against him. But he...

Politics

last month Sonny Boy by Al Pacino audiobook review – from the South Bronx to Hollywood

The actor warmly narrates this intimate account of his rise to stardom, from the traumas that shaped his childhood to the epiphany that would lead to his glittering careerThe title of Al Pacino’s memoir comes from the nickname given to him by his mother when he was growing up. His parents divorced when he was two, after which he and his mother moved in with his grandparents in the South Bronx, where violence and drugs were rife. One day, six-year-old Pacino was playing outside with his friends when he saw an ambulance pull up outside his grandparents’ tenement. He ran towards the building “and there, coming out of the front doors, carried on a stretcher, was my mother. She had attempted suicide.”Pacino, now 85, is our gravel-voiced narrator and his performance here is wonderful: warm, fitfully jovial and more intimate than you might expect from an actor who has spent much of his life keeping the public at arm’s length. As well as detailing early traumas – Pacino’s mother died when h...

Culture