Audiobooks by Annalena McAfee

Nightshade

Brought to you by Penguin. Family life. Reputation. It took a lifetime to build and a second to wreck. Only her work remains. Eve Laing, once the muse of an infamous painter, is now — forty years later — an artist herself. But she feels she has sacrificed her career for her family and she resents the global success of her old college roommate, now a celebrity of the international conceptual art scene. When Eve embarks on her most ambitious work yet, she takes a wrecking ball to her comfortable life, jettisoning her marriage for a beautiful young lover, a drifter half her age, who seems to share her single-minded creative vision. Nightshade charts Eve’s nocturnal walk through London, from her former family home in the west of the city back to her studio, a converted factory in the east, where her recently completed masterpiece hangs and a fatal reckoning awaits. This brilliant and timely novel explores sexual politics and the excesses of the contemporary art world, asking if the true artist must relinquish the ordinary human need for love and connection. Can the creative urge be the most destructive — even deadliest — impulse of all? © Annalena McAfee 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Annalena McAfee (Author), Jane Maud (Narrator)

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Hame: A Novel

Commissioned to set up a museum on a remote island in the north of Scotland and to write the biography of the island's celebrated poet and chronicler, Mhairi McPhail is slowly drawn in by the complicated life she is uncovering and writing about-the Bard of Fascaray-as she finds herself being transformed, awakened by the ferocity and power of the island. Who was the celebrated poet, Grigor McWatt, The Bard of Fascaray? What was his past? Details of his life are elusive. As Mhairi struggles to adapt to her island life and put her disappointment and troubles behind her, she begins to unearth the astonishing secret history of the poet, regarded by many as the custodian of Fascaray's-and Scotland's-soul. In McAfee's rich novel of invented island life, she interweaves extracts from Mhairi's journal entries, her discoveries and writings of McWatt, and tales of Fascaray itself into a resonant, compelling, dimensional narrative that at its heart explores identity, love, belonging and the universal quest for home.

Annalena McAfee (Author), Ruth Urquhart (Narrator)

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Hame

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Hame by Annalena McAfee, read by Cathleen McCarron and David Rintoul. Hame, n. Scottish form of 'home': a valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin In the wake of the breakdown of her relationship, Mhairi McPhail dismantles her life in New York and moves with her 9-year-old daughter, Agnes, to the remote Scottish island of Fascaray. Mhairi has been commissioned to write a biography of the late Bard of Fascaray, Grigor McWatt, a cantankerous poet with an international reputation. But who was Grigor McWatt? Details of his past - his tough childhood and his war years as a commando - are elusive, and there is evidence of a mysterious love affair which Mhairi is determined to investigate. As she struggles to adapt to her new life, and put her own troubled past behind her, Mhairi begins to unearth the astonishing secret history of the poet regarded by many as the custodian of Fascaray's - and Scotland's - soul. A dazzling, kaleidoscope of a novel, Hame layers extracts from Mhairi's journal, Grigor's letters and poems and his evocative writing about the island into a compelling narrative that explores identity, love and the universal quest for home.

Annalena McAfee (Author), Cathleen McCarron, David Rintoul (Narrator)

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