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Audiobooks Narrated by Olivia Laing
Browse audiobooks narrated by Olivia Laing, listen to samples and when you're ready head over to Audiobooks.com where you can get 3 FREE audiobooks on us
"Read by the author, Olivia Laing.
'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.' - Nigel Slater
'A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .'
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.
The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden."
"Read by the author, Olivia Laing.
'I couldn't put it down' - Sally Rooney, author of Normal People
Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It's the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.
Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment - marriage. But it's not only Kathy who is changing. Political, social and natural landscapes are all in peril. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when it could all end at any moment?
From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a politically-paralysed UK, Olivia Laing's first novel is a love letter, inspired by the life and work of Kathy Acker. It is a blistering rewire of the form and a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse.
'[Crudo] will blow you away' - Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Goldsmith's Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize"
