Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Body Lies by Jo Baker, read by Imogen Church, Deborah McBride, Sam Woolf, Simon Ludders and Julie Maisey.
A layered and thrilling suspense novel that grapples with how to live as a woman in the modern world - or in the pages of a book - when the stakes are dangerously high.
When a young writer accepts a job at a university in the remote countryside, it's meant to be a fresh start, away from the big city and the scene of a violent assault she's desperate to forget. But despite the distractions of a new life and single motherhood, her nerves continue to jangle. To make matters worse, a vicious debate about violence against women inflames the tensions and mounting rivalries in her creative writing group.
When a troubled student starts sending in chapters from his novel that blur the lines between fiction and reality, the professor recognises herself as the main character in his book - and he has written her a horrific fate.
Will she be able to stop life imitating art before it's too late?
At once a breathless cat-and-mouse game and a disarming exploration of sexual politics, The Body Lies is an essential book for our times.
From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a haunting new novel of spies and artists, passion and danger, hope in the face of despair
Paris, 1939. The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs-Élysées. A young, unknown writer-Samuel Beckett-recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon he will put them both in mortal danger by joining the Resistance . . .
Through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into one man's timeless art.
BY THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LONGBOURN
Paris, 1939: The pavement rumbles with the footfall of Nazi soldiers marching along the Champs Elysees. A young writer, recently arrived from Ireland to make his mark, smokes one last cigarette with his lover before the city they know is torn apart. Soon, he will put is own life and those of his loved ones in mortal danger by joining the Resistance...
Spies, artists, deprivation, danger and passion: this is a story of life at the edges of human experience, and of how one man came to translate it all into art.
Praise for Jo Baker's LONGBOURN:
'Intoxicating' Guardian
'Engrossing' Sunday Times
'Audacious' New York Times
• Pride and Prejudice was only half the story •
If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah often thought, she’d most likely be a sight more careful with them.
In this irresistibly imagined belowstairs answer to Pride and Prejudice, the servants take center stage. Sarah, the orphaned housemaid, spends her days scrubbing the laundry, polishing the floors, and emptying the chamber pots for the Bennet household. But there is just as much romance, heartbreak, and intrigue downstairs at Longbourn as there is upstairs. When a mysterious new footman arrives, the orderly realm of the servants’ hall threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, upended.
Jo Baker dares to take us beyond the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’s classic—into the often overlooked domain of the stern housekeeper and the starry-eyed kitchen maid, into the gritty daily particulars faced by the lower classes in Regency England during the Napoleonic Wars—and, in doing so, creates a vivid, fascinating, fully realized world that is wholly her own.
If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah thought, she would be more careful not to trudge through muddy fields.
It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and Sarah's hands are chapped and bleeding. Domestic life below stairs, ruled tenderly and forcefully by Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be disturbed by the arrival of a new footman smelling of the sea, and bearing secrets.
For in Georgian England, there is a world the young ladies in the drawing room will never know, a world of poverty, love, and brutal war.
This is the story of the Hasting family-their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks-captured in a seamless series of individual moments that span the years between the first World War and the present. The novel opens in 1914 as William, a young factory worker, spends one last evening at home before his departure for the navy...His son Billy, grows into a champion cyclist and will ride into the D-Day landings on a military bicycle...His son in turn, Will, struggles with a debilitating handicap to become an Oxford professor in the 1960s...And finally, young Billie Hastings makes a life for herself as an artist in contemporary London. Just as the names echo down through the family, so too does the legacy of choices made, chances lost, and truths long buried.
