Audiobooks benefit from a sense of enclosure; if the narrator can bring the listener into a bounded space and make them feel unwilling — or unable — to leave, the finished product can be gripping. Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Face (Bolinda Audio, 10 hrs 6 mins), which the author reads herself, is set largely in the confines of a small flat in Camden over the course of a single night, punctuated by forays into the past of recent memory and a very occasional outing to the pub or corner shop. Its protagonist and narrator is Eily, a young drama student living with her much older lover Stephen, both familiar from McBride’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, although this is in very little sense a sequel, and really doesn’t require prior knowledge of her work.
We encounter Eily in the aftermath of an initially unspecified traumatic event, when her flat is evidently functioning as both cocoon and snare. Stephen, returning each night from his theatre performance, entreats her to rejoin the outside world, but for the moment she is unable to, instead interrogating the events of the previous months, engaging her partner in cat-and-mouse conversation, moving swiftly between provocation and conciliation, and frequently retreating to the muddied, fast-flowing river of her own thoughts.
If it sounds solipsistic and claustrophobic, it is — but only in the most generative and thrilling manner: McBride’s gift for conveying a single consciousness in suggestive, occasionally fractured and consistently startling prose is prodigious. She is particularly accomplished at manipulating fictional time, at one point introducing a film script that we witness unfolding scene by scene at the same time as Eily, Stephen and his daughter Grace.
The City Changes Its Face deals with disturbing themes, childhood abuse and suicidal ideation among them, but in its commitment to understanding what powers love and survival, it is a curiously joyful novel. McBride trained as an actor and recently made a short film, and she narrates with a powerful understanding not only of words, but of the silences between them.
Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Canongate, 5 hrs 20 mins), is also exceptionally powerful, as a howl of rage and grief against the status quo must be. Written in response to the unfolding horrors in Palestine, it draws on El Akkad’s years as a journalist reporting from Kandahar to Guantánamo Bay and on his experiences as a man of Egyptian birth and Qatari upbringing who is now a citizen of the US. The result could be described as a polemic, but in many ways it is far more profound and wide-ranging than that; it asks us to consider the effects of moral relativism, of our ability to look to one side when confronted with unfathomable suffering.
I have interviewed El Akkad, so I’m familiar with the gentle, mannerly insistence of his voice, deployed here in his reading of the book. He is also a novelist, and knows well how to set a scene, and to create memorable images. But there is no mistaking the urgency of the questions he asks about the asymmetry of global power, the myopia of western journalism and the costs of not holding both to account. This is a book that many will take issue with, and most will find uncomfortable, which makes it even more important. Discomfort, as he points out, is a luxury.
But there is room, too, for some lighter listening. I immensely enjoyed Paraic O’Donnell’s The Naming of the Birds (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 10 hrs 8 mins), which plunges the audience into smelly, noisy late 19th-century London in the company of the redoubtable Inspector Cutter and somewhat less bluff sergeant Gideon Bliss, who begins by suffering the indignity of being issued with a firearm more suited to a woman, to prevent him from being knocked over by the recoil.
Joined by journalist Octavia Hillingdon, the trio investigate a series of grotesque murders among the elite, which appear to lead back to an institution that, 20 years previously, housed a group of children stripped of their names and referred to only as birds. Charles Armstrong delivers an enormously spirited reading, scampering up and down the class register and switching between adults and children seemingly at will.
And finally, another mystery that manages to encompass serious material: Nicci French’s latest, The Last Days of Kira Mullan (Simon & Schuster Audio, 11 hrs 35 mins), subsumes its whodunnit plot in a larger tale of coercive control. Nancy North has moved into a new flat with her boyfriend Felix, who is intent on protecting her from a recurrence of the psychosis she has recently endured. When the occupant of a neighbouring apartment is found dead, the residents and authorities alike are quick to accept that Kira ended her own life, but Nancy is not so sure.
What works so well in Sophie Roberts’ measured reading is that the listener, too, is unconvinced that Nancy is on the right track and not relapsing into illness. But are Felix’s attentions really as self-sacrificing as they seem? It’s a creepy listen, with just enough uncertainty to keep you on tenterhooks.
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X
