Try free for 30 days
-
A Memoir of My Former Self
- A Life in Writing
- Narrated by: Anne Enright, Aurora Dawson Hunte, Ben Miles, Bill Hamilton, Jane Wymark, Lydia Leonard, Nicholas Pearson, Sarah Waters
- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $26.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A tour-de-force of historical imagination, this is the story of three young men at the dawn of the French Revolution. Georges-Jacques Danton: zealous, energetic, debt-ridden. Maximilien Robespierre: small, diligent, and terrified of violence. And Camille Desmoulins: a genius of rhetoric, charming, handsome, but erratic and untrustworthy. As these key figures of the French Revolution taste the addictive delights of power, they must also come to face the horror that follows.
-
-
Too Long
- By mrs on 01-07-2015
-
Giving Up the Ghost
- A Memoir
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jane Wymark
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Opening with "A Second Home", in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, Giving Up the Ghost is a wry, shocking, and beautifully written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness, and family. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect left her childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn have come to haunt her life as a writer.
-
-
Unflinching
- By Anonymous User on 01-03-2024
-
Question 7
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: Richard Flanagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others.
-
-
Absolutely Superb
- By Anonymous User on 27-11-2023
-
Pheasants Nest
- By: Louise Milligan
- Narrated by: Sacha Horler
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kate Delaney has made the biggest mistake of her life. On a girls' night out, she picked the wrong sleazy guy to publicly humiliate in a bar, and now she is living every woman's worst nightmare.
-
-
Too much erroneous detail around a simple plot
- By Spencer on 26-04-2024
-
Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
-
-
Hauntingly beautiful and devastating
- By Kerry Muir on 25-09-2023
-
Shakespeare
- The Man Who Pays the Rent
- By: Judi Dench
- Narrated by: Brendan O’Hea, Barbara Flynn, Judi Dench
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the very first time, Judi opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra. In a series of intimate conversations with actor & director Brendan O'Hea, she guides us through Shakespeare's plays with incisive clarity, revealing the secrets of her rehearsal process and inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans.
-
-
The wisdom of Dame Judy Dench.
- By Matt goulden on 18-03-2024
-
A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A tour-de-force of historical imagination, this is the story of three young men at the dawn of the French Revolution. Georges-Jacques Danton: zealous, energetic, debt-ridden. Maximilien Robespierre: small, diligent, and terrified of violence. And Camille Desmoulins: a genius of rhetoric, charming, handsome, but erratic and untrustworthy. As these key figures of the French Revolution taste the addictive delights of power, they must also come to face the horror that follows.
-
-
Too Long
- By mrs on 01-07-2015
-
Giving Up the Ghost
- A Memoir
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jane Wymark
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Opening with "A Second Home", in which Mantel describes the death of her stepfather, Giving Up the Ghost is a wry, shocking, and beautifully written memoir of childhood, ghosts (real and metaphorical), illness, and family. Finally, at the memoir's conclusion, Mantel explains how a series of medical misunderstandings and neglect left her childless, and how the ghosts of the unborn have come to haunt her life as a writer.
-
-
Unflinching
- By Anonymous User on 01-03-2024
-
Question 7
- By: Richard Flanagan
- Narrated by: Richard Flanagan
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West's affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan's father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this genre-defying daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, literature, place and memory is about how reality is never made by realists and how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others.
-
-
Absolutely Superb
- By Anonymous User on 27-11-2023
-
Pheasants Nest
- By: Louise Milligan
- Narrated by: Sacha Horler
- Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kate Delaney has made the biggest mistake of her life. On a girls' night out, she picked the wrong sleazy guy to publicly humiliate in a bar, and now she is living every woman's worst nightmare.
-
-
Too much erroneous detail around a simple plot
- By Spencer on 26-04-2024
-
Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling. How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind?
-
-
Hauntingly beautiful and devastating
- By Kerry Muir on 25-09-2023
-
Shakespeare
- The Man Who Pays the Rent
- By: Judi Dench
- Narrated by: Brendan O’Hea, Barbara Flynn, Judi Dench
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the very first time, Judi opens up about every Shakespearean role she has played throughout her seven-decade career, from Lady Macbeth and Titania to Ophelia and Cleopatra. In a series of intimate conversations with actor & director Brendan O'Hea, she guides us through Shakespeare's plays with incisive clarity, revealing the secrets of her rehearsal process and inviting us to share in her triumphs, disasters, and backstage shenanigans.
-
-
The wisdom of Dame Judy Dench.
- By Matt goulden on 18-03-2024
-
The Fraud
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper - and cousin by marriage - of a once famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
-
-
Enthralling Tale
- By michele taylor on 17-09-2023
-
Beyond Black
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 17 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital ring road with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, passing on messages from beloved dead ancestors. But behind her plump, smiling persona hides a desperate woman: she knows the terrors the next life holds but must conceal them from her wide-eyed clients. At the same time she is plagued by spirits from her own past, who infiltrate her body and home, becoming stronger and nastier the more she resists....
-
-
Disappointing Book
- By Anonymous User on 04-06-2023
-
Appreciation
- By: Liam Pieper
- Narrated by: Zindzi Okenyo
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Oli Darling is a queer artist from the country - it says so right at the top of every press release. His art has brought him fame, money, fashionable substance abuse issues and only a little imposter syndrome. But then he goes on live TV and says the one thing that can get a rich white guy cancelled. With his reputation in tatters, nobody is buying Oli's schtick or his art. That's a problem for all the people who've invested millions in him. Powerful, dangerous people. To save his own skin, Oli will need to restore his public image.
-
Dark Arena
- The Frenchman Series, Book 2
- By: Jack Beaumont
- Narrated by: Julian Pulvermacher
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When a DGSE agent is brutally murdered in front of his family, the 'Company' swings into action, determined to track down the killers. Meanwhile, operative Alec de Payns is turning a Russian intelligence officer by blackmail. His team must establish who is posting classified material against the Kremlin to embassies all over Europe. The clues lead to a secret meeting of businessmen, terrorists and mercenaries on a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean, which Alec must infiltrate. What he discovers there will set Europe on course for catastrophe.
-
-
Interesting, bit tricky to follow
- By Kate on 06-04-2024
-
Mantel Pieces
- Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Olivia Dowd, Hilary Mantel - introduction
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.
-
-
Great novelists essays
- By Frank Love on 25-09-2022
-
The Frenchman
- By: Jack Beaumont
- Narrated by: Julian Pulvermacher
- Length: 11 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A gripping debut thriller based on the real-life experiences of a former French intelligence operative. Alec De Payns is an operative in the secretive Y Division of the DGSE, France’s famed foreign intelligence service. He’s the agent at the sharp end of clandestine missions, responsible for eliminating terror threats and disrupting illegal nuclear and biological weapons programs. The element the missions have in common is danger - danger to de Payns, to his team and to those who stand in his way.
-
-
Boring
- By Dean Grutteria on 27-11-2023
-
The Wren, the Wren
- By: Anne Enright
- Narrated by: Anne Enright, Aoife Duffin, Owen Roe, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nell - funny, brave and so much loved - is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.
-
-
beautiful language
- By Anonymous User on 07-02-2024
-
The Bee Sting
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, and others
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the master of tragicomedy and award-winning author of Skippy Dies: a tour de force new novel about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is (maybe) ending. Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, a state-of-the-nation novel about one unhappy family in the midst of meltdown.
-
-
Was good until the end :(
- By Tim C. on 15-04-2024
-
How to End a Story
- Diaries 1995-1998
- By: Helen Garner
- Narrated by: Helen Garner
- Length: 8 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Helen Garner’s third volume of diaries is an account of a woman fighting to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her. Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship - and the truth of her own self.
-
-
Wonderful
- By Anonymous User on 05-11-2022
-
Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black and More
- A BBC Radio Drama Collection
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Hilary Mantel, Alison Steadman, Rosie Cavaliero, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 7 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the 21st century's most celebrated authors, Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: for 2009's Wolf Hall, the first in her phenomenally successful Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third novel in the series, 2020's The Mirror and the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. This collection includes three of her best works of contemporary fiction, ranging from the Gothic to the blackly comic.
-
Wifedom
- Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life
- By: Anna Funder
- Narrated by: Arianwen Parkes-Lockwood, Jane Slavin
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Looking for wonder and some reprieve from the everyday, Anna Funder slips into the pages of her hero George Orwell. As she watches him create his writing self, she tries to remember her own... When she uncovers his forgotten wife, it's a revelation. Eileen O'Shaughnessy's literary brilliance shaped Orwell's work and her practical nous saved his life. But why - and how - was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwell's marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and WWII in London.
-
-
All praise for this monumental work
- By Win Jodell on 15-07-2023
-
James
- By: Percival Everett
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
James is an enthralling novel that leaves an indelible mark, forcing us to see Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a wholly new and transformative light. From the shadows of Huck Finn’s mischievous spirit, Jim emerges to reclaim his voice, defying the conventions that have consigned him to the margins.
Publisher's Summary
A Memoir of My Former Self reveals the shape of Hilary Mantel's life in her own dazzling words, narrated by a prestigious cast of actors and notable literary figures connected to Hilary's work.
From her unique childhood to her all-consuming fascination with Thomas Cromwell that grew into the Wolf Hall Trilogy, Hilary Mantel had a celebrated career as a novelist. Alongside this, she long contributed to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. This strand of Hilary's writing was an integral part of how she thought of herself. 'Ink is a generative fluid,' she explains. 'If you don't mean your words to breed consequences, don't write at all.' A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.
Mantel's subjects are wide-ranging. She discusses nationalism and her own sense of belonging; our dream life flopping into our conscious life; the mythic legacy of Princess Diana; the many themes that feed into her novels—revolutionary France, psychics, Tudor England—and other novelists, from Jane Austen to V. S. Naipaul. She writes about her father and the man who replaced him; she writes fiercely and heartbreakingly about the battles with her health she endured as a young woman, and the stifling years she found herself living in Saudi Arabia. Here, too, is a selection of her film reviews—from When Harry Met Sally to RoboCop—and, published for the first time, her stunning Reith Lectures, which explore the process of art bringing history and the dead back to life.
Compelling, often very funny, always luminous, it is essential listening from one of our greatest writers.
Voiced by Ben Miles, Lydia Leonard and Aurora Dawson-Hunte; all of whom have featured in stage adaptions of Hilary's work. With contributions from actress Jane Wymark, narrator of Hilary's memoir Giving up the Ghost. Readings from authors Anne Enright; the first Laureate for Irish Fiction and winner of the 2007 Booker Prize, and Sarah Waters; British Book Award Author of the Year and two-time Booker Prize nominee. Joining the cast are Hilary's long-time literary agent Bill Hamilton and her publisher for nearly twenty years, Nicholas Pearson.
'A smart, deft, meticulous, thoughtful writer, with such a grasp of the dark and spidery corners of human nature'—Margaret Atwood
More from the same
What listeners say about A Memoir of My Former Self
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Stephanie
- 25-04-2024
Interesting for fans/poor narrator
Enjoyable set of essays and newspaper style pieces that fills in some interesting information about the author’s background and life.
The narrator of part III has a mild speech impediment (a wet lisp) that is quite distracting.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!