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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The nights are drawing in and the celebrity autobiographies are bursting out: before the season advances much further, you’ll barely be able to move for the smiling faces on embossed covers beseeching you to accompany them on a tour of their past.
To navigate the onslaught, you’ll need to be discriminating. I suggest starting with Kathy Burke’s A Mind of My Own (Simon & Schuster Audio, 9 hrs 30 mins), a welcome — and welcoming — antidote to glittering showbiz anecdotes and aspirational wellness routines.
I confess to an interest-by-marriage in Burke’s descriptions, read by the actor-comedian herself, of her childhood in what was then a very Irish enclave in Islington, London: my husband grew up in the same community, playing football with Burke’s brother. But while my husband’s upbringing was secure, Burke’s was anything but: her mother died when she was two, and her father struggled with alcoholism for most of his life.
She narrates these sections of the book with immense pragmatism, but a sense of loss and dislocation is also present. When as a teenager she discovers drama via a local theatre, her feeling of relief and opportunity is palpable. Audiences, especially in the UK, are so familiar with Burke’s voice, from her work with Harry Enfield to numerous other TV and film roles, that you might think we would be lulled into cosiness; but in fact that familiarity makes this story of a woman’s determination to forge her own path even more remarkable.
Burke’s voice is low, and almost growly, but she has nothing on Evan Dando, the rock star and Lemonheads frontman whose upbringing in Boston was strikingly more privileged and comfortable, but who nonetheless embarked on a stalwart programme of self-sabotage. Narrating Rumours of My Demise (Faber & Faber, 8 hrs 15 mins), Dando tells us how he trembled on the precipice of greatness with The Lemonheads and then succumbed to years of addiction and disarray, all of which he delivers in a husky, offbeat and often humorous tone, as if to say “Can you believe I did that?” It’s a beguiling performance, though not one that tempts you to have been in his shoes, or indeed anywhere near him.
And now for a virtually antithetical life story. Nearly all of us will endure the death of someone we love deeply, and often at very close quarters. Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man (Penguin Audio, 5 hrs 12 mins) captures the truth of this intense experience: that death and dying are at once inarguably universal and painfully specific.
Perry’s father-in-law David “lived for 77 years and he died for 48 days” — a comparatively brief period of serious illness, but one nonetheless filled with immense physical, mental and emotional variety. The shock and distress of his diagnosis, soon followed by his death, are there, but so are the insights into his life, his character and his importance to his family.
The actor Lydia Leonard reads Perry’s account with impressive range and subtlety: her tone is sombre when it needs to be, light and almost lively when she is conveying moments of joy and grace, attentive to the bewilderment and chaos that accompany the ebbing of life, but also those passages of peace and connection. It’s a wonderful rendition of a profound and enlightening book by an award-winning novelist.
In their extremely different ways, each of these audiobooks grapples with the weight of reality, and so we might need something that is pure pleasure, and light as a feather. Bob Mortimer, comedian, fisherman and sometime autobiographer, has proved to be an adept comic novelist. His latest work of fiction, The Long Shoe (Simon & Schuster Audio, 7 hrs 25 mins), is characteristically offbeat and thoroughly amiable.
Mortimer assumes the persona of Matt, a redundant bathroom salesman (“I’d lost my passion for sanitary-ware”) who has also recently split from girlfriend Harriet and, to complete the hat trick, is about to be without fixed abode. When a lifeline appears in the form of a new job with a luxury flat thrown in, Matt’s luck appears to have changed, but if something looks too good to be true . . .
Mortimer is joined by actors Diane Morgan and Arabella Weir to guide us through the ensuing mildly madcap mystery, and while there are no great surprises, there are plenty of one-liners and crossed wires to make this an entertaining listen.
But if you prefer your thrillers a little less caperish and a little more hard-edged, look no further than Ann Cleeves’s The Killing Stones (Macmillan Audio, 10 hrs 57 mins), read with suitable tension by Kenny Blyth.
The novel marks the return of her long-standing detective Jimmy Perez, now building a life on Orkney with his new partner and their infant son. This is the start of a fresh series by the ever-gripping Cleeves, and she begins with thunder and lightning, literally, as the aftermath of a storm yields the corpse of a man killed with a Neolithic stone. It’s perfect early winter listening, especially if the wind’s roaring outside.
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