The new year is a perfect time to reconsider absolutely everything. Let’s start by turning the established literary canon upside down. The six books that I’m discussing this month give fresh insight into famous literature by reinterpreting it. Plus, they offer breathtaking prose, adventure and drama, and a good amount of humor. We could use all of that right now.
James by Percival Everett
We begin with Percival Everett’s James, a reimagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In an Earphones Award-winning performance by Dominic Hoffman, we hear directly from Jim, who tells his own tale about fleeing to avoid being sold, and finding himself entangled with the troublesome Huck Finn. A veteran code-switcher, Jim moves as needed between his naturally elegant speech and the pidgin diction expected by white people. The vocal shifts heighten the story’s tension, and prove Golden Voice Hoffman a master in this eloquent, witty, and moving performance.
Fagin & Miss Havisham by James Thayer
Why was Miss Havisham of Dickens’s Great Expectations such an embittered old lady? Christopher Lane’s performance of Fagin & Miss Havisham by James Thayer explains it all. After being jilted and robbed, Margaret Havisham contacts the pickpocket Fagin (from Oliver Twist) to help her wreak revenge. Demonstrating his Earphones Award-winning chops, Lane creates an audio world peopled with 19th-century London types, from anonymous dustmen and urchins to famous characters like Fagin, Bill Sykes, and Nancy, and Jaggers and Magwitch from Great Expectations. It’s so entertaining that I like to think the master himself would have approved.
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
Hannah van der Westhuysen’s character-sensitive performance and gentle, beautifully enunciated English accent help wash listeners into Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, a moody revisiting of King Lear. Set in a watery near-future, the story introduces us to three estranged queer sisters who navigate their relationships, romantic involvements, and the surrounding world after the death of their father. Subtle and haunting, it stays with the listener even after it’s done. The same is true of Armfield’s 2022 novel Our Wives Under the Sea, for which Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway won Earphones Awards. Elusive, evocative, and set in another watery world, it considers the nature of love and what we will do for those we care about.
A Daughter of Fair Verona by Christina Dodd
So, it turns out that Romeo and Juliet didn’t die. Think of all the tears I could have saved if I’d known that earlier! According to Christina Dodd’s reimagining, A Daughter of Fair Verona, they survived the poison and became the parents of Rosaline, a headstrong daughter of marriageable age. Enter the delightful Suzy Jackson, who voices Rosy as a bright, witty, go-getting 20-year-old. Sick of her parents’ melodramatic passion, she determines to marry for practical reasons, only to have her intended be murdered at the betrothal ball. Suzy is suspected and goes all-out to find the real culprit. Jackson’s Suzy sounds appropriately young and unfazed; the other characters are realistic; and the results are loads of fun.
Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon
Four stellar artists, Christina Cole, Rachel Bavidge, Robert Bathurst, and Steve John Shepherd, bring Mark Haddon’s Dogs and Monsters to gripping and vivid life. A short story collection that revisits and resets some well-known Greek myths, the tales investigate family, violence, hubris, love, identity, and fate. Each narrator brings vocal allure plus rigor, clarity, and compassion to their performance. The allure and compassion are particularly important, for though marvelous, the stories are sometimes brutal or dystopian. Haddon’s 2019 novel The Porpoise, for which Tim McInnerny won an Earphones Award, also played with the established canon by turning Shakespeare’s Pericles on its head. This time it’s a tale told by a girl trying to escape an abusive father. When her would-be savior tries to help, he finds himself on a boat traveling backward in time. As our reviewer said, “once you begin the voyage that is this novel, McInnerny’s gale-force narration will drive you on.”
The Voyage Home by Pat Barker
My last suggestion on our theme is The Voyage Home, the final installment in the Women of Troy trilogy by Booker Award winning author Pat Barker. Kristin Atherton, who narrated this and the first two books, The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, delivered an Earphones Award performance each time. These feminist retellings of Homer’s The Iliad are brilliant — eloquent, fierce, powerful, and rousing. I was bereft when the series ended and I no longer had Atherton’s remarkable narration in my ears. I have been pressing the audiobooks on friends ever since. Do listen.