On the beach
Four great audiobooks to take on your journey
Her Majesty’s Royal Coven Juno Dawson, HarperVoyager, £14.49
New supernatural series about a top-secret government department of…witches, yes, you heard right, witches. Her Majesty’s Royal Coven (HMRC) has been set up to protect crown and country from magical forces and supernatural evil. But there’s a prophecy that will bring the coven down – from within – and a group of best friends are about to be caught in the eye of its storm.This is the debut adult fantasy novel from Dawson who won the 2020 Young Adult Book Prize with Meat Market. Narrated by Nicola Coughlan in 10 hours and 40 minutes, it’s a bewitching audio.
This Is Gonna End In Tears
Liza Klaussmann,
John Murray, £21.99 Klaussmann’s Tigers In Red Weather was an international best seller and a Richard & Judy Book Club pick. It also won the British National Book Award for best debut novel of the year, and the Elle Grand Prix for Fiction. So P.S. has high expectations of this hot and restless summer story spiked with glorious 1980s detail featuring Miller, Olly and Ash, inseparable friends from youth. Olly and Miller fell in love, but Miller married Ash. Now she’s 40 and feels like she’s disappearing.They get together again to try to understand what they have but are so focused on their own love, losses and longing that they fail to notice what is unfolding with Miller’s son. Just over 12 hours of addictive listening.
Belonging: Natural Histories Of Place, Identity And Home Amanda Thomson, Canongate, £20.99
A lyrical love letter to the natural world, especially the landscapes of Scotland and the pinewoods of Abernethy, this captivating audio equally has its focus on family, identity and belonging and on how place, language and our loved ones shape us all.Thomson, a Scottish artist and visual writer, explores what it means to have and to make a home, not just personally but also politically.The written memoir released at the same time as the audio contains Thomson’s own photographs and illustrations, along with directories of nature words, many in the Scots tongue. Thought provoking.
The Twilight World Werner Herzog, Penguin Audio, £17.99
Werner Herzog is a German author and film and opera director and regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema. It was while he was in Japan in 1997 directing an opera in Tokyo that he first met the legendary Hiroo Onoda, a Second World War Japanese soldier who defended a small island in the Philippines for 29 years after the conflict ended, unaware that it had.The pair met many time until Onoda’s death in 2014.The result is this novel, narrated by the author in three hours and 20 minutes.The Twilight World immortalises the late soldier’s bizarre and epic struggle in what is part documentary, part poem and part dream.Tantalising.