Audiobooks by Katherine Bucknell

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

"The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait. Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. While living in Berlin, he began to write his reputation-making fiction and plays inspired by the city's nightlife, its artistic underbelly, its fevered politics. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita. Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out."

Katherine Bucknell (Author), Katherine Bucknell (Narrator)

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The Flynn Guarneri

"The Guarneri, a violin rarer than a Stradivarius, belonged to the charismatic Irish virtuoso Robert Flynn. Famed for his performances of the classical repertoire, including the early works of Ernest Grayson, Flynn wandered the countryside anonymously, playing in villages and collecting folk tunes before he died young during World War I. Ernest Grayson, arguably the greatest British composer of the twentieth century, suffered a crisis of imagination in 1908 and spent time in a sanatorium in Zurich, where he was treated with the latest European therapies and returned to composing, creating his master works during the 1930s before committing suicide amid the chaos of World War II. In the early 1990s, the teenaged American prodigy Allegra Balsen is about to perform Ernest Grayson’s first violin concerto on the Flynn Guarneri at Lincoln Center, when her best friend, a young cellist, is murdered backstage. Allegra goes on defiantly, to commemorate her friend and to honor the retiring concert mistress, violinist Moira Flynn. Two Princeton musicologists attend the performance. They are studying Grayson’s work. As they delve into his musical scores, letters, photographs and other papers, they begin to untangle complicated love and family relations among Flynn, Grayson and descendants, coming closer and closer to the murderer, who is still at large and seeking another victim. A brainy and haunting romance of the twentieth century—musical genius, madness, and love seen through the acute, empathetic eyes of academic detective Dr. Lucy Wunder as she, too, is pulled into the web."

Katherine Bucknell (Author), Annabel Mullion, Simon Callow (Narrator)

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