TOP AUDIOBOOKS: LONGER LISTENS
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I'm Absolutely Fine!
By: Emilie McMeekan & Annabel Rivkin
Narrated By: Emilie McMeekan & Annabel Rivkin
I’m absolutely fine but I slightly need to pee, I followed the road less travelled and now I don’t know where the hell I am, I may bleed to death shaving my legs, my soul aches, another week has ended without me becoming accidentally rich, I just put my keys in the fridge, unexpected object in the bagging area, I’ll have a café mocha vodka Valium latte to go please, where’s my phone? My anxieties have anxieties, no…not like that – here, I’ll do it, do I have to do everything? WTF?
Is it just me? We gnaw on that, don’t we? Is it just me? Well, look around. Look at the rage, the resolution, the ‘hear me roar’, the panic, the power, the chin hairs, the shame, the empathy, the conversation, the sheer potential.
Welcome to Midulthood. A place where we recognise that we are all more alike than we are unalike. Of course it’s not just you. If we’re not in it together, we’re not in it at all….
From sex (What Could Possibly Go Wrong) to self-image (Does This Straightjacket Make Me Look Fat?), I’m Absolutely Fine is a wry look at real life, real wisdom and real information framed in fun.
Annabel Rivkin and Emilie McMeekan founded The Midult in 2016. They are journalists, worriers and incredibly good friends. Annabel has written for everybody from The Times to Vogue, while Emilie has been Features Editor of the Evening Standard and Deputy Editor of Tatler. Together they write a Midult column in the Saturday Telegraph Magazine and Annabel has a column in the Evening Standard’s ES Magazine. Emilie is sunshine, Annabel is brimstone and together they wrote this book, lying on the floor a lot and stroking their beards.
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The Wolf:
Under the Northern Sky, Book 1
By: Leo Carew
Narrated By: Matt Addis
Leo Carew’s debut novel, The Wolf, the first book in the Under the Northern Sky series, is a masterpiece in epic historical fantasy – a new voice to rival David Gemmell or George R. R. Martin.
Violence and death have come to the land under the Northern Sky. The Anakim dwell in the desolate forests and mountains beyond the black river, the land under the Northern Sky. Their ancient ways are forged in Unthank silver and carved in the grey stone of their heartland, their lives measured out in the turning of centuries, not years.
By contrast, the Sutherners live in the moment, their vitality much more immediate and ephemeral than their Anakim neighbours. Fragile is the peace that has existed between these very different races – and that peace is shattered when the Suthern armies flood the lands to the north.
These two races revive their age-old hatred and fear of each other. Within the maelstrom of war, two leaders will rise to lead their people to victory. Only one will succeed.
The Wolf is a thrilling, savagely visceral, politically nuanced and unexpectedly wry exploration of power and identity – and how far one will go to defend them.
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A Long Night in Paris
By: Dov Alfon
Narrated By: Matt Addis
From a former Israeli intelligence officer comes the most realistic, thrilling and authentic thriller of the year.
Chinese gangsters and Israeli intelligence face off in Paris – Israel’s best-selling book of 2017, perfect for fans of Homeland, John Le Carré and Mick Herron.
When an Israeli tech entrepreneur disappears from Charles de Gaulle airport with a woman in red, logic dictates youthful indiscretion. But Israel is on a state of high alert nonetheless. Colonel Zeev Abadi, the new head of Unit 8200’s autonomous Special Section, who just happens to be in Paris, also just happens to have arrived on the same flight.
For Commissaire Léger of the Paris Police, coincidences have their reasons, and most are suspect. When a second young Israeli is kidnapped soon after arriving on the same flight, this time at gunpoint from his hotel room, his suspicions are confirmed – and a diplomatic incident looms.
Back in Tel Aviv, Lieutenant Oriana Talmor, Abadi’s deputy, is his only ally, applying her sharp wits to the race to identify the victims and the reasons behind their abduction. In Paris a covert Chinese commando team listens to the investigation unfurl and watches from the rooftops. While by the hour the morgue receives more bodies from the river and the city’s arrondissements.
The clock has been set. And this could be a long night in the City of Lights.
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Henry VIII and the Men Who Made Him
By: Tracy Borman
Narrated By: Julie Teal
Tracy Borman, author of the best-selling biography Thomas Cromwell, takes us behind the scenes of Henry VIII’s court and sheds new light on the most notorious Tudor monarch through the fresh perspective of his male relationships.
Henry VIII is well known for his tumultuous relationships with women, and he is often defined by his many marriages. But what do we see if we take a different look? When we see Henry through the men in his life, a new perspective on this famous king emerges….
Henry’s relationships with the men who surrounded him reveal much about his beliefs, behaviour and character. They show him to be capable of fierce but seldom abiding loyalty, of raising men only to destroy them later. He loved to be attended and entertained by boisterous young men who shared his passion for sport, but at other times he was more diverted by men of intellect, culture and wit. Often trusting and easily led by his male attendants and advisers during the early years of his reign, he matured into a profoundly suspicious and paranoid king whose favour could be suddenly withdrawn, as many of his later servants found to their cost. His cruelty and ruthlessness would become ever more apparent as his reign progressed, but the tenderness that he displayed towards those he trusted proves that he was never the one-dimensional monster that he is often portrayed as.
In this fascinating and often surprising new biography, Tracy Borman reveals Henry’s personality in all its multifaceted, contradictory glory.
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Twilight
By: Stephenie Meyer
Narrated By: Ilyana Kadushin
A story that captured the imaginations of a generation, Twilight is reimagined in audiobook form through the subtle narrative style of Ilyana Kadushin. As she breathes life into Bella’s words, allow yourself to get caught up in this undeniable romance.
When seventeen-year-old Isabella Swan moves to Forks, Washington to live with her father she expects that her new life will be as dull as the town itself.
In spite of her awkward manner and low expectations, she finds that her new classmates are drawn to this pale, dark-haired new girl in town. But not, it seems, the Cullen family. These five adopted brothers and sisters obviously prefer their own company and will make no exception for Bella.
Bella is convinced that Edward Cullen in particular hates her, but she feels a strange attraction to him, although his hostility makes her feel almost physically ill. He seems determined to push her away – until, that is, he saves her life from an out of control car.
Bella will soon discover that there is a very good reason for Edward’s coldness. He, and his family, are vampires – and he knows how dangerous it is for others to get too close.
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Oathbringer
By: Brandon Sanderson
Narrated By: Michael Kramer and Kate Reading
From the best-selling author who completed Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series comes a new original creation that matches anything else in modern fantasy for epic scope, thrilling imagination, superb characters and sheer addictiveness.
Return to a planet swept by apocalyptic storms, a world tipping into war as aristocratic families move to control the shard blades and shard plates, ancient artefacts from a past civilisation that can win wars.
As the world tips into a war for control of the mythical artefacts of power made from Shard, characters are swept up into new dangers which will threaten their integrity and their lives.
Huge, ideas-filled, world-spanning fantasy from a master of the genre.
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The Little Stranger
By: Sarah Waters
Narrated By: Simon Vance
A ghost story from one of Britain’s finest and best loved writers. After her award-winning trilogy of Victorian novels, Sarah Waters turned to the 1940s and wrote The Night Watch, a tender and tragic novel set against the backdrop of wartime Britain. Short-listed for both the Orange and the Man Booker, it went straight to number one in the best-seller chart.
In a dusty postwar summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his.
Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story.
London Rules
By: Mick Herron
Narrated By: Sean Barrett
Longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.
London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one.
Cover your arse.
Regent’s Park’s First Desk, Claude Whelan, is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he’s facing attack from all directions himself: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number 10; from the showboat’s wife, a tabloid columnist, who’s crucifying Whelan in print; and especially from his own deputy, Lady Di Taverner, who’s alert for Claude’s every stumble.
Meanwhile, the country’s being rocked by an apparently random string of terror attacks, and someone’s trying to kill Roddy Ho.
Over at Slough House, the crew are struggling with personal problems: repressed grief, various addictions, retail paralysis, and the nagging suspicion that their newest colleague is a psychopath. But collectively, they’re about to rediscover their greatest strength – that of making a bad situation much, much worse.
It’s a good job Jackson Lamb knows the rules. Because those things aren’t going to break themselves.
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