Edna O'Brien has 10 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 20 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 22 ratings. The most-rated is The Country Girls.
The Country Girls
Summary
It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend, Baba, are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world - of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin – where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world.
©2010 AudioGO Ltd (P)1960 Edna Gebler
The Little Red Chairs
Summary
A woman discovers that the foreigner she thinks will redeem her life is a notorious war criminal. Vlad, a stranger from Eastern Europe masquerading as a healer, settles in a small Irish village where the locals fall under his spell. One woman, Fidelma McBride, becomes so enamored that she begs him for a child. All that world is shattered when Vlad is arrested, and his identity as a war criminal is revealed. Fidelma, disgraced, flees to England and seeks work among the other migrants displaced by wars and persecution. But it is not until she confronts him - her nemesis - at the tribunal in The Hague that her physical and emotional journey reaches its breathtaking climax. The Little Red Chairs is a book about love and the endless search for it. It is also a book about mankind's fascination with evil and how long, how crooked, is the road toward home.
©2016 Edna O'Brien (P)2016 Hachette Audio
The Lonely Girl
Summary
Caithleen and Baba, first encountered in The Country Girls, are now living in Dublin, where they discuss men, drink gin, and try to look fast. Cait, in the pursuit of true love, becomes involved with the fanatically domineering Eugene Gaillard. Painful disillusion and occasional moments of bliss in her life make this a bittersweet tale, and it is told with all the perception and wit that is the hallmark of Edna O’Brien.
©1962 Edna O’Brien (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Girls in their Married Bliss
Summary
Kate and Baba are in London, playing out the tragicomedy of their married lives to its surprisingly level-headed conclusion. Kate, feeling trapped in her grey stone house with her increasingly cold husband, tearfully looks for her dreams of romance elsewhere. And when Eugene takes terrible, implacable revenge, she naturally turns to her brazen friend Baba for help. But Baba, the bored trophy wife of builder Frank, vulgarly flashing his wealth and ignorance to the world, has her own problems without Kate drooping self-pityingly over her. And both women find unsuspected qualities in themselves as they learn to face reality. The last book in the 'Country Girls' Trilogy, which began with 'The Country Girls' and was followed by 'Girl with Green Eyes'.
©1964 Edna O'Brien (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Country Girl
Summary
Edna O'Brien's family encouraged her to attend pharmacy school but she left before finishing, to marry an older writer, give birth to two sons, and publish, in 1960, her first novel. The Country Girls so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by the priest, her family disgraced. Country Girl comes 21 books later, a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that imprint upon and enliven one lifetime. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating family house in Ireland and the physicality of family life in the country, her story moves on to the crushes and challenges of convent school; elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, and the wild parties of the '60s in London that included people from all walks of life, including such stars as Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, and Paul McCartney. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as an acclaimed writer who was sought and hosted by Jackie Onassis and invited to the White House by Hillary Clinton. The "broken piano" state of old age is heightened by the intensity of reading, and the drive to write. Brilliant and sensuous, Country Girl is a book that Edna O'Brien was always meant to write.
©2013 Edna O'Brien (P)2013 Hachette Audio
Selected Shorts
Summary
Selected Shorts: Falling in Love presents a collection of stirring tales of love and longing: Rick Bass' "Fires", read by Ted Marcoux Padgett Powell's "The Winnowing of Mrs. Schuping", read by Christina Pickles Laurie Colwin's "The Lone Pilgrim", read by Hope Davis E. Nesbit's "Melisande", read by Jane Curtin Edna O'Brien's "Violets", read by Fionnula Flanagan Maile Meloy's "Travis, B.", read by William Hurt Selected Shorts is an award-winning series of classic and contemporary short fiction read by acclaimed actors. The series originates at Peter Norton Symphony Space in New York City. The Selected Shorts radio series is a co-production of Symphony Space and WNYC, New York Public Radio, and is heard on public radio stations nationwide.
©2006 The Symphony Space, Inc. (P)2006 The Symphony Space, Inc.
The Country Girls
Summary
All three BBC radio dramatisations of Edna O’Brien’s coming-of-age trilogy set in 1950s Ireland. Now a much-loved modern classic, the Country Girls Trilogy was fiercely controversial when first published in the 1960s. Banned by the Irish censors and burned by the church, the books nonetheless achieved widespread acclaim and international success and launched Edna O’Brien’s literary career. These three BBC radio adaptations follow the lives and loves of best friends Kate and Baba, two teenage girls growing up in repressive rural Ireland in the years before the sexual revolution. The Country Girls sees the duo leaving their small country village for convent school - but the bright lights of Dublin beckon, promising glamour, adventure and romance. In The Lonely Girl, dreamy Kate longs for love, while worldly-wise Baba makes the most of the opportunities the big city offers. Girls in Their Married Bliss finds the two friends living across the sea in London, where both have found husbands - but will marriage and motherhood bring happiness or heartbreak? Funny, moving and painfully honest, these evocative dramas are a passionate affirmation of female friendship and desire and a vivid portrait of a country struggling to throw off the shackles of prudishness, misogyny and religious conservatism. Charlie Murphy (Peaky Blinders, Happy Valley) stars as Kate, with Aoibhinn McGinnity (Resistance, Nightflyers) as Baba. Edna O'Brien is the much acclaimed author of The Country Girls Trilogy. She recently won the David Cohen Prize for Literature for having “broken down social and sexual barriers for women in Ireland and beyond and moved mountains both politically and lyrically through her writing”. Written by Edna O’Brien. Dramatised by Lin Coghlan. Produced and directed by Sally Avens and Jessica Dromgoole. First broadcast BBC Radio 4, 26 August-6 September 2019 (The Country Girls), 14-25 October 2019 (The Lonely Girl), 9-13 December 2019 (Girls in Their Married Bliss).
©2019 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd (P)2019 BBC Studios Distribution Ltd
HiBrow: World Book Night 2012
Summary
A celebration of adult literature and reading. The whole book industry, including booksellers, librarians and publishers, were invited come together and pick out their favourite titles to be included the final list of 25 books by authors from the UK and Ireland. The final list included fiction, poetry and memoirs, among others. There were some best sellers, some classics and some lesser known. Interviews with Rupert Everett, Kathy Lette, Colin Salmon, Akala, Edna O'Brien, Martina Cole, Monica Ali, Iain Banks, Jon Ronson, David Nicholls, Sarah Waters, DBC Pierre, Margaret Atwood, Tracy Chevalier, Jude Kelly, Owen Teale and Meg Rosoff.
©2012 One Media iP Ltd (P)2018 One Media iP Ltd
The Love Object
Summary
Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master" (Harold Bloom). As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." The 31 stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked, and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York", the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother while in "Sister Imelda" and "The Creature", the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. "The Love Object" recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover. The magnificent, midcareer story "Lantern Slides" portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include "Shovel Kings" - "a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation" (Sunday Times) - and "Old Wounds", which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins. In 2011 Edna O'Brien's gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart. "The most striking aspect of Edna O'Brien's short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity" (John Banville).
©2015 Edna O'Brien (P)2015 Hachette Audio
Girl
Summary
One of The New York Times Book Review's 2019 Notable Books of the Year An NYPL Book for Reading and Sharing for 2019 One of The Guardian's (UK) 2019 Best Books of the Year One of Esquire Magazine's 2019 Best Books of the Year "Narrator Sheila Atim sets a sensitive yet emphatic tone for this harrowing story of violence, loss, and survival.... Listeners will be enveloped in this emotional listening experience." (AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner) This program is read by Laurence Olivier Award-winning actress, Sheila Atim. Girl, Edna O’Brien’s hotly anticipated new novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness. I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood. From one of the century's greatest living authors, Girl is an unforgettable story of one victim’s astonishing survival, and her unflinching faith in the redemption of the human heart. Praise for Girl: "Edna O’Brien tells this story with such compassion and understanding that the very disturbing events she relates are uplifting - and unforgettable. An utterly unique achievement." (Ian McKellen) "By an extraordinary act of the imagination we are transported into the inner world of a girl who, after brutal abuse as a slave to Nigerian jihadis, escapes and with dogged persistence begins to rebuild her shattered life. Girl is a courageous book about a courageous spirit." (J. M. Coetzee)
©2019 Edna O'Brien (P)2019 W. F. Howes Ltd.