It’s a brutal small-town thriller, set in Australia during the worst drought in a century.
In The Dry by Jane Harper (2016) a detective returns to his home town for the funeral of his best friend, who has, everyone says, committed suicide after murdering his wife and six-year-old son. I love the way they can take me to another place, and sometimes their atmospheres seep into my work. This love of listening to stories has carried on for me, and I listen to a lot of audiobooks when I am working. When we were children, growing up in Guyana, we relied on teenagers to give us descriptions of plot, with actions, of the adult-rated films we couldn’t get into – like vampire movies or spaghetti westerns. Andoh stars alongside a stellar cast in a performance of Naomi Alderman’s addictive novel The Power (2016). I also had to choose something narrated by Adjoa Andoh, because she narrates so many of the books I listen to. To have the veteran civil rights activist and acting legend Ruby Dee read it in the 2004 version is a huge privilege, one that I recommend.Īmericanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of those books that I struggled to accept having finished, because I wanted – no, needed – it to go on. So it seems fitting to experience her greatest novel – Their Eyes Were Watching God, written in 1937 – in audio form. In Red Dust Road(2010) she takes you on a journey through adoption in the 1960s, a gay black coming of age and a battle to find and love her biological parents and her Nigerian heritage.Īnthropologist Zora Neale Hurston believed profoundly in the literary genius of African American oral traditions, and set about documenting them at great personal cost. I also think that Scots Makar Jackie Kay’s voice is itself a form of poetry. Her replacement showed me an odd-looking object called an iPod, and I knew that we were nowhere near the end. The head of the audiobook division at my publisher resigned in around 2003, telling me that cars no longer having cassette decks had killed the audiobook format. The best thing about the audiobook format has been watching the past two decades of change. It’s a joy hearing him take the longest possible route through any sentence.Īnd I’ve got Stephen King’s The Bazaar of Bad Dreams (2015) on the go – a short story here, another one there, for walks or times when I want a snack and not a meal.
I’m also listening to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, narrated by Peter Wickham (2020). Beneath the glorious surrealism and the joy of the tall tale, I found a level of existential horror and of fear. Irish actor Jim Norton’s reading of The Third Policeman (2012) is one of my favourite audiobooks, because it added a layer to Flann O’Brien’s novel that I had failed to perceive when I read the prose. I listened to these examples of triumph while starting my Couch to 5K programme and started to confront the things I deem as disadvantages in my life and work.
BEST AUDIO BOOK OF 2020 SERIES
The book is a series of case studies exploring how underdogs beat the odds. Trevor Noah quoted from David and Goliath (2013) by Malcolm Gladwell when speaking about power and legitimacy on The Daily Show. Her voice captures the thrill of live music and performance in the recordings. I went to look for her albums, Hadeel and We Teach Life, in which you get lessons in the plight of Palestine, protest and celebration of the Arabic language. The line “Today, my body was a TV’d massacre” just kept ringing in my ear. But then we migrate to the midwest United States and we’re standing in the cold, with Darling realising that the grass is not always greener.įor a different voice, I saw a video on YouTube of spoken word artist and activist Rafeef Ziadah performing We Teach Life, Sir. To see the country through a child’s eyes is joyous and heartbreaking. In the coming-of-age story We Need New Names (2013) by NoViolet Bulawayo, you are transported to Zimbabwe through the voice of Darling, a 10-year-old girl growing up in the shanty town of Paradise under Mugabe’s regime.
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