Canoes

· MacLehose Press · Narrated by Alexandra Boulton
Audiobook
4 hr 4 min
Unabridged
Eligible
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About this audiobook

A beautiful collection of seven short stories and a novella themed around women's voices from the author of Mend the Living and Painting Time

Seven interconnected stories orbit a central novella to create a collection of tales which resonate with the sound of women's voices.

A widower struggles to erase his wife's voice from his answering machine. Two old friends meet after a period apart and find they can no longer fit into their habitual rhythm. A woman records herself reading a poem for two sisters who obsessively collect voice recordings.

At the heart of Canoes is "Mustang", in which a woman moves with her family to the suburbs of Denver, where her partner takes up a research post. As her husband and child fit seamlessly into their new lives, she remains aloof, consumed by a feeling of not belonging, and observing as her loved ones change and adapt to these alien surroundings.

In this moving and deeply poetic audio collection, Maylis de Kerangal casts light on the balance between life and death, exploring the traces we leave upon each other's lives and creating space for women of all ages to be heard.

Translated from the French by Jessica Moore

(P)2023 Quercus Editions Limited

About the author

Maylis de Kerangal spent her childhood in Le Havre, France. Her novel, Birth of a Bridge, was the winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis in 2010. In 2014, her fifth novel, Mend the Living, was published to wide acclaim in France, winning the Grand Prix RTL-Lire award and the student choice novel of the year from France Culture and Télèrama. In the UK, Mend the Living was longlisted for the Booker International Prize in 2016, and won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017 - only the second novel and the first work in translation ever to do so.

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