Audiobooks by Philip Hensher

A Small Revolution in Germany is about growing up, or refusing to accept what growing up means; it’s about the small dishonest pacts that people make with their own futures; and it’s about the rare and joyous refusal to be disillusioned. Everyone remembers what it’s like to be seventeen. The conversations you have; the ideas that burst on you; the kiss that transforms you. And then you grow up, and make a deal with adulthood. A Small Revolution in Germany is about that rapturous moment when ideas, and ideals, and passion crash over one boy’s head. And what happens in the decades afterwards? When you see the overwhelming truth when you are seventeen, why should you ever abandon that truth? Spike is brought into a small, clever group of friends, bursting with a passion for ideas, and the wish to change the world. They smash up political meetings; they paint slogans on walls; they long for armed revolution; they argue, exuberantly, until dawn. In the years to follow, they all change their minds, and go into the world. They become writers, politicians, public figures. One of them becomes famous when she dies. They all change their minds, and make sensible compromises. Only Spike stays exactly as he is, going on with the burning desire for change, in the safe embrace of unconditional love. Alone from the old group, he is the only one who has achieved nothing, and who has never deviated from the impractical shining path of revolution he saw as a teenager. Thirty years on, photographs of the teenage group look like a bunch of celebrated individuals, with only one unknown face in it – Spike.

Philip Hensher (Author), Neville Watchurst (Narrator)

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The Friendly Ones

'It's the book you should give someone who thinks they don't like novels ... Here is surely a future prizewinner that is easy to read and impossible to forget' Melissa Katsoulis, The Times The things history will do at the bidding of love On a warm Sunday afternoon, Nazia and Sharif are preparing for a family barbecue. They are in the house in Sheffield that will do for the rest of their lives. In the garden next door is a retired doctor, whose four children have long since left home. When the shadow of death passes over Nazia and Sharif's party, Doctor Spinster's actions are going to bring the two families together, for decades to come. The Friendly Ones is about two families. In it, people with very different histories can fit together, and redeem each other. One is a large and loosely connected family who have come to England from the subcontinent in fits and starts, brought to England by education, and economic possibilities. Or driven away from their native country by war, murder, crime and brutal oppression - things their new neighbours know nothing about. At the heart of their story is betrayal and public shame. The secret wound that overshadows the Spinsters, their neighbours next door, is of a different kind: Leo, the eldest son, running away from Oxford University aged eighteen. How do you put these things right, in England, now? Spanning decades and with a big and beautifully drawn cast of characters all making their different ways towards lives that make sense, The Friendly Ones, Philip Hensher's moving and timely new novel, shows what a nation is made of; how the legacies of our history can be mastered by the decision to know something about people who are not like us.

Philip Hensher (Author), Chetan Pathak (Narrator)

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Tales of Persuasion

Ten daring stories from 'a writer who seems capable of anything' (Guardian), the Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip Hensher Backdrops vary in this collection of stories from the author of The Northern Clemency - from turmoil in Sudan following the death of a politician in a plane crash, to southern India where a Soho hedonist starts to envisage the crump and soar of munitions. Each story, regardless of location, reveals a great writer at the peak of his powers.

Philip Hensher (Author), Peter Joyce (Narrator)

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The Emperor Waltz

The most ambitious and daring novel novel yet from Booker Prize-shortlisted Philip Hensher.'A novel that's almost fizzy to the touch ... A performance of extraordinary flair and majesty from a writer who seems capable of anything' GuardianAn astonishing novel, 'The Emperor Waltz' draws together various narrative strands into a compelling symphonic whole. In a third-century desert settlement on the fringes of the Roman Empire, a new wife becomes fascinated by a cult that is persecuted by the Emperor Diocletian. In 1922, Christian, a young artist, travels to Weimar to begin his studies at the Bauhaus, where the avant-garde confronts conservative elements around it. With postwar Germany in turmoil, while the Bauhaus attempts to explore radical ways of thinking and living, Christian finds that love will change him for ever. And in 1970s London Duncan uses his inheritance to establish the country's first gay bookshop in the face of opposition from the neighbours and victimisation by the police.Delving deep into the human spirit to explore connections between love, sanctity, commitment and virtue, Philip Hensher takes as his subject small groups of men and women, tightly bound together, trying to change the world through the example of their lives. 'The Emperor Waltz' is an absorbing echo-chamber of a novel, innovative and compelling, that explores what it means for us to belong to each other.

Philip Hensher (Author), Anna Bentinck, Hugh Ross, Penelope Rawlins, Philip Hensher, Sandra Duncan (Narrator)

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King of the Badgers

After the success of The Northern Clemency, shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us another slice of contemporary life, this time the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of a small English town.After the success of The Mulberry Empire and The Northern Clemency, which was short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Philip Hensher brings us the peaceful civility and spiralling paranoia of the small English town of Handsmouth.Usually a quiet and undisturbed place situated on an estuary, Handsmouth becomes the centre of national attention when an eight-year-old girl vanishes. The town fills with journalists and television crews, who latch onto the public's fearful suspicions that the missing girl, the daughter of one of the town's working-class families, was abducted.This tragic event serves to expose the range of segregated existences in the town, as spectrums of class, wealth and lifestyle are blurred in the investigation. Behind Handsmouth's closed doors and pastoral façade the extraordinary individual lives of the community are exposed. The undisclosed passions of a quiet international aid worker are set against his wife, a woman whose astonishing aptitude for intellectual pursuits, such as piano-playing and elaborate cooking, makes her seem a paragon of virtue to the outside world. A recently-widowed old woman tells a story that details her late discovery of sexual gratification. And the Bears - middle-aged, fat, hairy gay men, given to promiscuity and some drug abuse - have a party.As the search for the missing girl elevates, the case enables a self-appointed authority figure to present the case for increased surveillance, and, as old notions of privacy begin to crack, private lives seep into the public well of knowledge.Handsmouth is a powerful study of the vital importance of individuality, the increasingly intrusive hand of political powers and the unyielding strength of Nature against the worst excesses of human behaviour.

Philip Hensher (Author), Mike Rogers (Narrator)

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