Prize Winners 2015Talking Books

The titles in this booklist are just a selection of the titles available for loan from the RNIB National Library Talking Book Service.

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Man Booker Prize 2015

Winner

James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. 2015. General fiction. TB 22421.Jamaica 1976. Seven gunmen storm Bob Marley’s house, machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but the gunmen are never caught. This is an exploration of the fallout from this near-mythic event. Spanning three decades and crossing continents, A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the lives of a host of unforgettable characters – slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists and even the CIA. This novel is told mainly in Jamaican patois from multiple character viewpoints, often in a stream-of-consciousness style.Read by multiple narrators. 26 hours 5 minutes.

Shortlisted books

Tyler, Anne. A Spool of Blue Thread. 2015. Family stories. TB 22302.'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon...' This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that summer's day in 1959. The whole family on the porch, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. From that porch we spool back through three generations of the Whitshanks, witnessing the events, secret and unguarded moments, that have come to define who and what they are. And while all families like to believe they are special, round that kitchen table over all those years we see played out the hopes and fears, the rivalries and tensions of families everywhere.Read by Stephanie Ellyne. 12 hours 28 minutes.

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Yanagihara, Hanya. A Little Life. 2015. General fiction. TB 22298.When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, their broke, adrift and buoyed only by their ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel, Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry into the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realise, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome- that will define his life forever.Read by Robert G Slade. 33 hours 45 minutes.

Sahota, Sunjeev. The Year of the Runaways. 2015. General fiction. TB 22420.Three young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the chaotic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband’s clothes-in case the immigration men surprise her with a call. She is Narinder, and her story is the most surprising of them all.Read by Sartaj Garewal. 16 hours 7 minutes.

McCarthy, Tom. Satin Island. 2015. General fiction. TB 22422.Meet U. – a “corporate anthropologist” pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. U.’s employers have set him two tasks. First, he must assist in the launching of a great, epoch-defining project which no one, least of all its own architects, fully understands. Second, he has been asked to compose the seemingly impossible; the Great Report – an ethnographic document to sum up our age. Instead, procrastinating, meandering, drifting through the endless buffer-zones of

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information, U. grows obsessed with the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis.Read by James Garnon. 6 hours 4 minutes.

Obioma, Chigozie. The Fishermen. 2015. General fiction. TB 22419.Told from the point of view of nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is story of an unforgettable childhood in 1990s Nigeria. When their father has to work away, the brothers take advantage of his extended absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river they encounter a madman, who predicts that one of the brothers will kill another. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact will transcend the lives and imaginations of both its characters and its readers.Read by Jude Owusu-Achiaw. 10 hours 20 minutes.

Man Booker Prize 2014

Winner

Flanagan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. 2014. General fiction. TB 21509.In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Burma Death Railway, surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, cholera and beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever.Read by Peter Land. 14 hours 38 minutes.

Shortlisted books

Ferris, Joshua. To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. 2014. General fiction. TB 21494.Paul O'Rourke, 40-year-old slightly curmudgeonly dentist, runs a thriving practice in New York. Yet he is discovering he needs more in his life. As Paul tries to work out what, a Facebook page and

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Twitter account appear in his name. And what is most disturbing is that is becomes evident that the online 'Paul' might be a better version of the man in the flesh. Who is doing this and will it cost Paul his sanity?Read by Michael FitzPatrick. 11 hours 22 minutes.

Fowler, Karen Joy. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. 2014. General fiction. TB 21496.Rosemary, just at college, has decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we're not going to tell you too much either: you'll have to find out for yourselves. Rosemary used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone – vanished from her life. It's a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice.Read by Katherine Mangold. 8 hours 51 minutes.

Jacobson, Howard. J. 2014. General fiction. TB 21497.Two people fall in love in a world where the past is dangerous, not to be talked about or visited. As they discover where they came from and where they are going, a bigger, more shattering truth is revealed to them. Kevern doesn't know why his father made him put two fingers across his lips whenever he began a word with a J.Read by Adjoa Andoh and Colin Mace. 11 hours 5 minutes.

Mukherjee, Neel. The Lives of Others. 2014. General fiction. TB 21493.Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in student unrest, agitation, extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is a note. His family are unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting.Read by Raj Ghatak. 21 hours 55 minutes.

Smith, Ali, How to be both. 2014. General fiction. TB21498This is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths,

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and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Read by John Banks. 8 hours 30 minutes.

Man Booker Prize 2013

Winner

Catton, Eleanor. The Luminaries. 2013. Historical fiction. TB 20798.It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men, who have met in secret to discuss a series of unsolved crimes. A wealthy man has vanished, a whore has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely patterned as the night sky.Read by Mark Meadows. 29 hours 19 minutes.

Shortlisted books

Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. 2013. General fiction. TB 20797.Darling is a young girl from a slum in Zimbabwe called Paradise. Out of school because the teachers have all emigrated, she spends her days running with her pack of friends and stealing guavas from the plush neighbourhood of Budapest. But everyone wants to go to the real paradise in America or Britain. Read by Robin Miles. 9 hours.

Crace, Jim. Harvest. General fiction. 2013. TB 20799.In a remote, unnamed English hamlet, perhaps in the 17th Century, a trio of outsiders set up camp on the outskirts. That same night the local manor house is set on fire. Over the course of 7 days a chain of disastrous and shocking events play out,

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narrated by labourer Walter Thirsk, against a back drop of the enclosure of common land for sheep-farming. Read by Steve Hodson. 9 hours 23 minutes.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. 2013. General fiction. TB 20800.Subhash and Udayan, close in age, were inseparable in a childhood spent in suburban Calcutta. Yet as the years draw on, Udayan finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty. He will give everything, risk all, for what he believes, and in doing so will transform the futures of those dearest to him: his newly married, pregnant wife, his brother and their parents. The repercussions of his actions reverberate across continents and seep through the generations that follow. Read by Chetan Pathak. 12 hours 43 minutes.

Ozeki, Ruth L. A Tale for the Time Being. 2013. General fiction. TB 20801. Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery. Read by Ruth L Ozeki. 15 hours 29 minutes.

Toibin, Colm. The Testament of Mary. 2012. General fiction. TB 20802.For Mary, her son has been lost to the world, and now, living in exile and in fear, she tries to piece together the memories of the events that led to her son's brutal death. Read by Sherry Baines. 3 hours 30 minutes.

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Man Booker Prize 2012

Winner

Mantel, Hilary. Bring up the Bodies. 2012. Historical fiction. TB 19919.The sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the bodies explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.Read by Christopher Oxford. 16 hours 24 minutes.

Shortlisted books

Tan, Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists. 2012. General fiction. TB 20036.It's Malaya, 1949. After studying law at Cambridge and time spent helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals, Yun Ling Teoh, herself the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle fringed plantations of Northern Malaya where she grew up as a child. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the Emperor of Japan. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in Kuala Lumpur, in memory of her sister who died in the camp.Read by Elaine Claxton. 14 hours 38 minutes.

Levy, Deborah. Swimming Home. 2011. General fiction. TB 20037.Swimming home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on apparently stable, well-turned-out people. Set in a summer villa, the story is tautly

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structured, taking place over a week in which a group of beautiful flawed tourists in the French Riviera come lose at the seams.Read by Joan Walker. 4 hours 5 minutes.

Moore, Alison. The Lighthouse. 2012. General fiction. TB 20038.The Lighthouse begins on a North Sea ferry, on whose blustery outer deck stands Futh, a middle-aged, recently separated man heading to Germany for a restorative walking holiday. As he travels, he contemplates his childhood; a complicated friendship with the son of a lonely neighbour; his parents' broken marriage and his own. But the story he keeps coming back to, the person and the event affecting all others, is his mother and her abandonment of him as a boy, which left him with a void to fill, a substitute to find.Read by Di Langford. 5 hours 23 minutes.

Self, Will. Umbrella. 2012. General fiction. TB 20039.Psychiatrist Zach Busner arrives at a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London. He has every intention of avoiding controversy but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, who has been there for decades.Read by Matt Addis. 15 hours 46 minutes.

Thayil, Jeet. Narcopolis. 2012. General fiction. TB 20040.Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.Read by Chetan Pathak. 9 hours 38 minutes.

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Costa Book Awards

Costa Novel 2015 ShortlistEnright, Anne. The Green Road. 2015. General fiction.TB 22046.The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they could have never imagined in Dublin, New York, and Mali, West Africa. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she's decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold. A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic Coast, ‘The Green Road’ is a tale of family and fracture, compassion and selfishness - a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we strive to fill them.Read by Caroline Lennin. 9 hours 40 minutes.

Costa Biography 2015 ShortlistDouglas-Fairhurst, Robert. The Story of Alice: Lewis Carroll and the Secret History of Wonderland. 2015. TB 21929.Drawing on previously unpublished material ‘The Story of Alice’ illuminates the tangles history of two lives and two books, examining the particular friendship between Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell, the child for whom he invented the Alice stories. It analyses how their relationship influenced the creation of Wonderland, how the two Alice books took on an unstoppable cultural momentum in the Victorian era and why 150 years later they continue to enthral and delight us.Read by Russell Bentley. 18 hours 53 minutes.

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Costa Novel Award Winner 2014.

Smith, Ali, How to be both. 2014. General fiction. TB21498This is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Read by John Banks. 8 hours 30 minutes.

Costa Novel Award Shortlist 2014.Mukherjee, Neel. The Lives of Others. 2014. General fiction. TB 21493.Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in student unrest, agitation, extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is a note. His family are unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting.Read by Raj Ghatak. 21 hours 55 minutes.

Costa Biography Winner 2014.Macdonald, Helen. H is for Hawk. 2014. TB 22558.‘In real life goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland not gardens they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail.’ As a child Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer. She learned the arcane terminology and read all the classic books, including T. H. White’s tortured masterpiece, ‘The Goshawk’, which describes White’s struggle to train a hawk as a spiritual contest. When her father dies and she is knocked sideways by grief, she becomes obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She buys Mabel on a Scottish quayside and takes her home to Cambridge. This book is a record of a spiritual journey - an unflinchingly honest

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account of Macdonald’s struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk’s taming and her own untaming.Read by Helen Macdonald. 11hours 9 minutes.

Costa Book of the Year and First Novel Award 2013

Filer, Nathan. The Shock of the Fall. 2013. General fiction. TB 21284.I’ll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name’s Simon. I think you’re going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he’ll be dead. And he was never the same after that. This novel is narrated by Matthew Homes, a teenager suffering with mental illness in the wake of the sudden death of his brother Simon.Read by Tom Stanley. 6 hours 43 minutes.

Costa Novel Award Winner 2013.

Atkinson, Kate. Life After Life. 2013. Literary fiction. TB 21151.Todd family book 1. What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact, an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life after life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again.Read by Fenella Woolgar. 15 hours 31 minutes.

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Costa Novel Award Shortlist 2013.O’Farrell, Maggie. Instructions for a Heatwave. General fiction. TB 20279.The stunning new novel from Costa-Novel-Award-winning novelist Maggie O'Farrell: a portrait of an Irish family in crisis in the legendary heatwave of 1976. It's July 1976. In London, it hasn't rained for months, gardens are filled with aphids, water comes from a standpipe, and Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he's going round the corner to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta's children - two estranged sisters and a brother on the brink of divorce - back home, each with different ideas as to where their father might have gone. None of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.Read by Patricia Leventon. 10 hours 36 minutes.

Costa First Novel Award Shortlist 2013Sathnam Sanghera. Marriage Material. 2013. General fiction. TB21046If you’ve approached Bains Stores recently, you’d be forgiven for hesitating on doing so. A prominent window advert for a chocolate bar suggests the shop may have closed in 1994. The security shutters are stuck a quarter-open, adding to the general air of dilapidation. A push or kick of the door triggers something which is more grating car alarm than charming shop bell. To Arjan Banga, returning to the Black Country after the unexpected death of his father, his family’s corner shop represents everything he has tried to leave behind – a lethargic pace of life, insular rituals and ways of thinking. When his mother insists on keeping the shop open, he finds himself being dragged back, forced into big decisions about his imminent marriage back in London and uncovering the history of his broken family – the elopement and mixed-race marriage of his aunt Surinder, the betrayals and loyalties, loves and regrets that have played out in the shop over more than fifty years.Read by Chetan Pathak. 10 hours 12 minutes.

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Costa Biography 2013 ShortlistFrancis, Gavin. Empire Antarctica: ice, silence and emperor penguins. 2013. It is said to be one of our oldest stories: a young man goes to a far-off land in search of a mythical and wondrous beast. For years, Gavin Francis yearned to go to the remotest place on our planet, to see one of the strangest beasts alive. This is how he came to spend 14 months living alongside emperor penguins as the base camp doctor at Halley.Read by Tom Carter. 9 hours 51 minutes.Costa Book of the Year and Novel Award Winner 2012.

Mantel, Hilary. Bring up the Bodies. 2012. Historical fiction. TB 19919.The sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the bodies explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn.Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.Read by Christopher Oxford. 16 hours 24 minutes.

Costa First Novel Award 2012Segal, Francesca. The Innocents. 2012. General fiction. TB 20539.

Adam and Rachel, childhood sweethearts are getting married at last. Rachel is everything Adam has ever imagined in a wife and her parents adore him. A life of easy contentment awaits, at the heart of the community. But then Rachel’s reckless American cousin returns to the family fold.Read by Gloria Sanders. 10 hours and 23 minutes.

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Costa Biography 2012 ShortlistCooper, Artemis. Patrick Leigh Fermor: an adventure. TB 20312.Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) was a war hero whose exploits in Crete are legendary, and above all he is widely acclaimed as the greatest travel writer of our times, notably for his books about his walk across pre-war Europe.Read by Sherry Baines. 19 hours 21 minutes.

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction2015 Winner

Smith, Ali, How to be both. 2014. General fiction. TB21498This is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s.Read by John Banks. 8 hours 30 minutes.

2015 ShortlistWaters, Sarah. The Paying Guests. 2014. General fiction. TB21488It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned, the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa, a large silent house now bereft of brothers, husband and even servants, life is about to be transformed, as impoverished widow Mrs Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. For with the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the 'clerk class', the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. And as passions mount and frustration gathers, no one can foresee just how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be.Read by Juliet Stevenson. 21 hours 32 minutes.

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Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction

2014 Shortlist

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. 2013. General fiction. TB20541From the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, a powerful new novel of love, race and identity. As teenagers in Lagos Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. Self-assured Ifemelu departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race.Read by Amakar Okafor. 17 hours 25 minutes.

Tartt, Donna. The Goldfinch. 2013. General fiction. TB 21261Aged 13, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love - and his talisman, the painting, places him at the centre of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.Read by David Pittu. 32 hours 27 minutes.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. 2013. General fiction. TB 20800.Subhash and Udayan, close in age, were inseparable in a childhood spent in suburban Calcutta. Yet as the years draw on, Udayan finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty. He will give everything, risk all, for what he believes, and in doing so will transform the futures of those dearest to him: his newly married, pregnant wife,

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his brother and their parents. The repercussions of his actions reverberate across continents and seep through the generations that follow. Read by Chetan Pathak. 12 hours 43 minutes.

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction2013 Winner

Homes, A.M. may we be forgiven. 2013. General fiction. TB 20591Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper. They have been uneasy rivals since childhood. Then one day George loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life.Read by Robert S. Glade. 20 hours 58 minutes.

2013 Shortlist

Smith, Zadie. NW. 2012. General fiction. TB 20393Hobbes, Smith, Bentham, Locke and Russell. Five identical blocks make up the Caldwell housing estate in North West London. Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan have all moved on. They occupy separate worlds in an atomized city. Then one afternoon a stranger comes to Leah’s door forcing her out of her isolation.Read by Amaka Okafor. 10 hours 44 minutes.

Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behaviour. 2013. General fiction. TB 20511On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeing miracle, can the old certainties they have lived for centuries remain unchallenged?Read by Barbara Kingsolver. 16 hours 53 minutes.

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Mantel, Hilary. Bring up the Bodies. 2012. Historical fiction. TB 19919.The sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the bodies explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn.Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.Read by Christopher Oxford. 16 hours 24 minutes.

Atkinson, Kate. Life after Life. 2013. Literary fiction. TB 21151.Todd family book 1. What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were second chances? And third chances? In fact, an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want to? Life after life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century again and again.Read by Fenella Woolgar. 15 hours 31 minutes.

Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction2012 Winner

Miller, Madeline. The Song of Achilles. General fiction. 2011. TB 20013.This is a breathtakingly original rendering of the Trojan War – a devastating love story and a tale of gods and kings, immortal fame and the human heart.Read by David Thorpe. 11 hours 34 minutes.

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2012 ShortlistPatchett, Ann. State of Wonder. General fiction. 2011. TB 20020.There were people on the banks of the river. Among the tangled waterways and giant anacondas of the Brazilian Rio Negro, an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could alter the lives of women forever. Dr Annick Swenson's work is shrouded in mystery, she refuses to report on her progress, especially to her investors.Read by Nancy Baldwin. 12 hours.

Edugyan, Esi. Half Blood Blues. General fiction. 2011. TB 19030.The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He was twenty years old. He was a German citizen. And he was black. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there's more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter, bringing to the surface secrets buried since Hiero's fate was settled.Read by William Roberts. 11 hours 39 minutes.

Harding, Georgina. Painter of Silence. General fiction. 2011. TB 20506.An intimate and devastating portrait of Romania during and after the Second World War, through the prism of a moving and utterly original friendship.Read by Sian Thomas. 7 hours 47 minutes.

Enright, Anne. The Forgotten Waltz. General fiction. 2011. TB 18960.The Forgotten Waltz is a memory of desire: a recollection of the bewildering speed of attraction, the irreparable slip into longing, that reads with breathtaking immediacy. In Terenure, a pleasant suburb of Dublin, in the winter of 2009, it has snowed. A woman recalls the trail of lust and happenstance that brought her to fall for "the love of her life." As the city outside comes to a halt, she

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remembers the days of their affair in one hotel room or another: long afternoons made blank by bliss and denial. Now, as the silent streets and the stillness and vertigo of the falling snow make the day luminous and full of possibility, she awaits the arrival on her doorstep of his fragile, twelve-year-old daughter, Evie - the complication, and gravity, of this second life.Contains strong language.Read by Karen Cogan. 7 hours 20 minutes.

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