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A long and broken Easter trip was animated by the sound of Rachel Joyce, author of Harold Fry's improbable pilgrimageReading his new novel. The homemade God (Penguin Audio, 12 hours 43 minutes) takes us to a small island on Lake Orta in the north of Italy, where four brothers and sisters meet following the sudden death of their artist father. The unusual cause – an apparently accidental drowning – is still complicated by her recent and hasty marriage with the elusive Bella -Mae and the absence of both a will and his work much spoken in progress. As the installation suggests, there is an element of procedure of procedures, but it is largely secondary to the real emotional meat of history: the scary to find a place for sorrow in an already fragile network of intimate relationships.
The key is the tone, and Joyce, who was an actor before turning exclusively towards writing, module his with immense delicacy. It is impossible not to feel the comedy inherent in the brothers and sisters well worn in advance, nor to pain when their links begin to decompose: Netta hyper capable but watered, which was held as mother when theirs died prematurely; Freight Susan, locked in a marriage with a paternal figure as nice as his true father is carefree; Younger children in state of Gustav and Iris, each given to fanciful and real flights. She captures their proximity and distance from an impressive fleet and sympathy, just as she gives the floor to the impossible patriarch, Vic and Bella-Mae herself, who, when she finally arrives on the stage, is as modifiable and capricious as the mist by the lake.
I was entirely attracted by the sad and meditative world of The homemade GodEven though I thanked the fate that I was not brown in an overheated and isolated villa with its inhabitants.
You can barely get a listening experience more different from that of Oisín Fagan The shore of Eden (John Murray, 11 hours 38 minutes), read by Tom Alexander. If the Kemp de Joyce family is paralyzed by an inability to fly away from the nest, Angel Kelly de Fagan is at the other end of the scale: an imprudent adventurer who leaves Dublin of the 18th century with barely an indication of the place where he goes or what he will find when he arrives.
It is a huge tale game, which begins with Kelly aboard a ship filled with mutineers and desperate slaves to regain their freedom and ultimately land on the South American coast assailed by colonialism and conflicts. Throughout Alexander's performance and performances are designed to encompass the visceral physical experiences of travel – illness, sex, seasickness, violence – and its more cerebral aspects, in which politics, philosophy and idealistic utopianism of the time find the expression. Here are also the multiple languages, cadences and rhythms of a changing multicultural population, each of its desperate inhabitants to sail towards a greater safety place.
Recently preselected for the female fiction price of this year, Nussaibah Younis Fundamentally (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 9 am, 41 minutes) is an extremely full -minded first novel, delivered by Sarah Slimani with exactly the good combination of irreverence, fragility and humor. “It's not as if I expected Stalingrad,” thinks that Nadia Academic on her arrival in Iraq, “but Baghdad took the piss.” Why are there fairy lights on palm trees and carefully parked BMW? “Didn't I make a donation to help Iraqi women give birth in cow hangars lit by the flame of a single candle?”
Nadia is quickly confronted away between theory – she wrote a lot about “is bridles”, with her considerable professional advantage – and in practice, especially when she establishes a close friendship with Sara, an excellent example of the phenomenon while waiting for the next stage of a refugee camp. And perhaps the largest barrier to anyone who goes ahead, beyond ideology, faith and radicalism, is presented by rooted and bureaucratic aid organizations to alleviate the situation.
Nadia's voice is a rapid delight: it goes from the determination drawn to be part of the solution, to disillusionment and disappointment, to a perilous doubt. And in her combative friendship, often suspicious but insistent with Sara, comes the captivated underside of the novel – two determined protagonists, although slightly confused fraying a path through the young woman in ruthless circumstances.
And now for something completely different: Adam Nicolson Bird school (William Collins, 11 hours 53 minutes), in which the writer of nature confronts a gap in his knowledge – he never, he said to us at the start of the book, paid a lot of attention to birds – and will fill it. Reading calmly and regularly by Leighton Pugh is a book to listen to while you walk or look through your window; Even urban inhabitants without easy access to the countryside will learn a lot about creatures that throw themselves before them. And it is also, like so many contemporary writings on our environment is inevitably, a Breean of what we are in danger of losing.
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