Audiobooks by A. L. Kennedy

Charles Dickens: A BBC Biography Audiobook

A BBC radio collection celebrating Charles Dickens' life, work and influence Charles Dickens was a literary giant, second only to Shakespeare in the ranks of England's greatest writers. This extensive biographical collection looks at the man, his novels and his legacy to provide an all-round portrait of the much-loved author. Michael Eaton's five-play cycle Dickens in London, starring Samuel Barnett, Alex Jennings and Antony Sher, explores Dickens' changing relationship with the city that fired his imagination. His numerous achievements are discussed in Great Lives: Charles Dickens (featuring Armando Iannucci and Humphrey Carpenter) and In Our Time: Dickens (featuring Melvyn Bragg and guests). Sam West reads from Dickens' letters in Words and Music: Dickens's World; Simon Watts tells how the author's 1842 visit to the US became a turning point in his career in Witness History: Dickens in America; Ian Gillan takes a tour of Dickens' old home in Pride of Place: 48 Doughty Street; and in Night Waves, Philip Dodd talks to Claire Tomalin about her definitive biography, Charles Dickens: A Life. Literary Pursuits finds Sarah Dillon hunting for the story behind the story of Dickens' classic masterpiece, Great Expectations; and in The Mystery of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Frances Fyfield ponders what happened to the hero of Charles Dickens's final, unfinished novel? In Free Thinking: Dickens, Matthew Sweet and guests examine his oeuvre and the way his work connects with the present day, while Landmarks: Charles Dickens is devoted to the great author's final completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. Finally, Indian writer Ayeesha Menon finds out about her country's love affair with Charles Dickens in The Documentary: Dickens and India - Mutual Friends; and his enduring significance is explored in the five-part Radio 3 series The Writer's Dickens, in which contemporary novelists Tessa Hadley, Romesh Gunesekera, AL Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith and Justin Cartwright consider the craft of Dickens' prose and reveal how he is both a role model and a shadow looming over their own writing. Copyright © 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd. (P) 2021 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd

A. L. Kennedy, A.L. Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith, Armando Iannucci, Claire Tomalin, Melvyn Bragg, Romesh Gunesekera, Sam West, Tess Hadley (Author), A. L. Kennedy, A.L. Kennedy, Alexander McCall Smith, Armando Iannucci, Claire Tomalin, Melvyn Bragg, Romesh Gunesekera, Sam West, Tess Hadley (Narrator)

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Subterranean Homesick Blues: The Complete Series 1-3: A BBC Radio 4 drama

Love doesn't get easier when you're older but no wiser. Maggie and John had a passionate but disastrous affair in their younger days, but it didn't last. Now in their late sixties, a surprise encounter gives them another chance to take up where they left off. Will they manage to find the best in each other and finally get together? Or will old wounds and an awareness of their ageing bodies deter them? Will the treadmill created by the high-cost, high-pressure 21st century, and their endless other commitments and interruptions large and small, overwhelm them? Or will they take the final risk? This delightful comic drama stars Bill Nighy as John and Anna Calder-Marshall as Maggie. A.L. Kennedy is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction, an academic and a stand-up comedian. Directed by Sally Avens.

A L Kennedy, A. L. Kennedy (Author), Anna Calder-Marshall, Bill Nighy (Narrator)

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Serious Sweet

Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize A good man in a bad world, Jon Sigurdsson is fifty-nine and divorced, a senior civil servant in London who hates many of his colleagues and loathes his work for a government engaged in unmentionable acts. Meg Williams is a bankrupt accountant - two words you don't want in the same sentence, or anywhere near your résumé. She's forty-five and shakily sober, living on Telegraph Hill in London, where she can see the city unfurl below her. Somewhere out there is Jon, pinballing around the city with a cell phone and a letter-writing habit he can't break. He's a man on the brink, leaking government secrets and affection for a woman he barely knows as he runs for his life. Poignant, deeply funny, and beautifully written, Serious Sweet is about two decent, damaged people trying to make moral choices in an immoral world, ready to sacrifice what's left of themselves for honesty and for a chance at tenderness. As Jon and Meg navigate the sweet and serious heart of London - passing through twenty-four hours that will change them both forever - they tell an unusual and moving love story.

A. L. Kennedy (Author), Simon Mattacks (Narrator)

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Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse: A 4th Doctor novel

An original novel by A.L. Kennedy featuring the Fourth Doctor, as played by Tom Baker in the BBC TV series.Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again.It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch – owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others arethinking, without anyone saying a word. Whatever it is, the Doctor is most at home when faced with the distinctly odd. With the help of Fetch Brothers’ Junior Receptionist Bryony, he’ll get to the bottom of things. Just so long as he does so in time to save Bryony from quite literally losing her mind, and the entire world from destruction.Because something huge, ancient and alien lies hidden beneath the ground – and it’s starting to wake up...

A. L. Kennedy, A.L. Kennedy (Author), Clare Corbett (Narrator)

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All the Rage

A. L. Kennedy, whose novels include The Blue Book and Day, writes like a force of nature. Claire Messud says she’s “one of Britain’s most iconoclastic and fiercely independent talents.” Richard Ford calls her “a profound writer,” and Ali Smith hails her as “the laureate of good hurt.” All the Rage is Kennedy’s riveting new story collection, a luscious feast of language that encompasses real estate and forlorn pets, adolescents and sixty-somethings, weekly liaisons and obsessive affairs, “certain types of threat and the odder edges of sweet things.” The women and men in these twelve stories search for love, solace, and a clear glimpse of what their lives have become. Anything can set them off thinking—from the sad homogeneity of hotel breakfasts, to a sex shop operated under Canadian values (whatever those are), to an army of joggers dressed in Santa costumes. With her boundless empathy and gift for the perfect phrase, Kennedy makes us care about each of her characters. In “Takes You Home,” a man’s attempt to sell his flat becomes a journey to the interior, by turns comic and harrowing. And “Late in Life” deftly evokes an intergenerational love affair free of the usual clichés, the younger partner asking the older, “What should I wear at your funeral?” Alive with memory, humor, and longing, All the Rage is A. L. Kennedy at her inimitable best.

A. L. Kennedy (Author), Heather Wilds, Simon Vance (Narrator)

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The Blue Book

From one of the U.K.’s most dazzling novelists—whom Richard Ford has called “a profound writer”—comes this daring new novel set in the unsteady, self-contained world of a luxury liner. While on a transatlantic trip with her soon-to-be-fiancé Derek, Elizabeth unexpectedly runs into ex-lover Arthur, with whom she shares a shady past: the pair once worked as traveling spiritual mediums who conned the vulnerable by pretending to contact the spirits of departed loved ones. While Derek remains seasick and cabin-bound, Elizabeth wanders the ship, alternately avoiding and seeking out Arthur. Unable to avoid memories of their fractured past, she must face the deception they practiced even as she accepts the peace they brought to the grief-stricken who sought their services. Intimately addressed to “you,” the listener, The Blue Book is both a portrait of two methodical con artists and a meditation on “how love is a private language, a set of codes, to which the outside world ought not admit impediment” (Telegraph). Irresistibly written, by turns comically wry and stunningly lyrical, with “some of the most unashamedly erotic writing since Nicholson Baker first contemplated a telephone receiver” (New Statesman), the book slowly, deliberately, and devastatingly reveals itself to the listener. The heartbreaking stakes are ultimately nothing less than fact and fiction, life and death.

A. L. Kennedy (Author), Rosalyn Landor (Narrator)

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