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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
As spring swells, so too do publishers’ fiction lists, and among them this year is Andrew O’Hagan’s bravura piece of storytelling, Caledonian Road (Faber & Faber, 22 hrs, 51 mins), read by actor Michael Abubakar, most recently seen on film in Wonka. This is a multi-stranded, state-of-the-nation tale, revolving around celebrity art historian Campbell Flynn, whose fascination with the political and social smarts of his student Milo Mangasha leads — and this really isn’t a spoiler — to a grand unravelling.
Despite Campbell’s prominence, this is a work of many voices, from embittered sitting tenants to hedonistic Russian oligarchs to braying aristocrats and the battle-hardened members of street gangs. It’s also a novel of constant tonal shifts, the better to transport us through the corridors of power to the streets and pavements that criss-cross the capital. Listening to it can be dizzying, especially when concrete details give way to the more elusive and ethereal business of cyber-hacking and cryptocurrency, and when its grand guignol moments of comedy switch to something far more poignant and reflective.
Abubakar takes this roiling narrative in his stride, at one minute stepping into the velvet slippers of a louche playboy, at another catching Campbell’s bewilderment at the gradual collapse of the well-ordered and painstakingly refined life he has built. At considerable listening length, this probably isn’t a work of the imagination that you can tackle in one go, but if you approach it in the style of a Dickensian serial — to which it owes a significant and acknowledged debt — it will pay dividends.
From a determinedly wide canvas to a series of enlightening miniatures. Ensemble books can make for immensely entertaining reading into which one may descend, magpie-like, to retrieve whichever object seems to be glittering most brightly. Annabelle Hirsch’s A History of Women in 101 Objects (Canongate, 13 hrs, 12 mins) is exactly this kind of work, and thanks to some ambitious and inspired commissioning its audio version is spellbinding. In one chapter, you might find former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard examining a lipstick; in another actor Celia Imrie gazing into a medieval ivory mirror. Gillian Anderson breathes life into the human femur that captivated anthropologist Margaret Mead, historian Janina Ramirez considers a 15th-century figurine of Mary Magdalene, Kate Winslet assesses how a cinematograph shaped culture.
As you can tell, the treasures here are legion, the cast stellar, and the historical and geographical sweep impressive. You will no doubt find your favourites — mine was Sue Perkins exploring the Ladies of Llangollen, whose love story started in Kilkenny, in a grand house near where I live, with a daring escape and a dog called Frisk.
Perhaps spurred on by a very long spell of driving accompanied by Ian Holm’s magnificent reading of The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (a tip for Audible subscribers; it’s included in your membership package), my thoughts have turned to suspense, in the shape of two new mysteries. They are of a very different kind, however, both from Collins and one another.
First up is Stuart Turton’s The Last Murder at the End of the World (Raven Books, 10 hrs, 58 mins), read by actor Adjoa Andoh, who crops up frequently in this column as an expert and suggestive interpreter of prose fiction. She has plenty to work with here: a tiny, closed community in which a brutal murder has taken place. But this is a locked room with a difference — a Greek island surrounded by a dense fog that has wiped out the rest of humanity, leaving its inhabitants as the lone survivors, protected only by a security system that will fail if the murder isn’t solved. Andoh has a lot of fun with the narrative’s twists and turns (including the disappearance of the characters’ memories and a cast that includes a raspily growling village elder called Niema), and pitches her tone perfectly to capture the novel’s over-the-top dystopian claustrophobia.
Nicci French’s Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? (Simon & Schuster Audio, 12 hrs, 34 mins), meanwhile, is rooted in a much more recognisable reality — an East Anglian village with the customary conflicts and group dynamics — but also incorporates an extended timeframe, multiple perspectives and that most contemporary of plot engines, a true crime podcast, all of which combine to produce a pacy and gripping listen.
Jane Collingwood reads, first taking us back to the disappearance of the eponymous Charlotte in the 1990s — an unsolved puzzle that has left her four children, her husband and their circle reeling. The challenge for a narrator is to pique the audience’s interest and then carry us forward to the present day, in which Charlotte’s daughter Etty is caring for her father as his dementia worsens, and which also features a police investigation. Collingwood manages it with aplomb, ably navigating the red herrings and dead ends and the emotional impact of devastating loss and its long tail.
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