Jane Gardam has 14 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 25 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 9 ratings. The most-rated is Old Filth.
Old Filth
Summary
Long ago, Old Filth was a Raj orphan - one of the many young children sent 'home' from the East to be fostered and educated in England. Jane Gardam's novel tells his story, from his birth in what was then Malaya to the extremities of his old age. In so doing, she not only encapsulates a whole period from the glory days of British Empire, through the Second World War, to the present and beyond, but also illuminates the complexities of the character known variously as Eddie, the Judge, Fevvers, Filth, Master of the Inner Temple, Teddy and Sir Edward Feathers.
©2004 Jane Gardam (P)2015 Hachette Audio
The Man in the Wooden Hat
Summary
Filth (Failed in London, Try Hong Kong) is a successful lawyer when he marries Elisabeth in Hong Kong soon after the war. Reserved, immaculate, and courteous, Filth finds it hard to demonstrate his emotions. But Elisabeth is different - a free spirit. She was brought up in the Japanese internment camps, which killed both her parents but left her with a lust for survival and an affinity with the Far East. No wonder she is attracted to Filth's hated rival at the bar - the brash, forceful Veneering. Veneering has a Chinese wife and an adored son - and no difficulty whatsoever in demonstrating his emotions.... How Elisabeth turns into Betty and whether she remains loyal to stolid Filth or is swept up by caddish Veneering makes for a pause-resisting plot in a perfect novel which is full of surprises and revelations as well as the humour and eccentricities for which Jane Gardam's writing is famous.
©2009 Jane Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Last Friends
Summary
Shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize. Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife, Betty. Last Friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love. Veneering's were not the usual beginnings of an establishment silk: the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in Northeast England and a devoted local girl, he escapes the war to emerge in the Far East as a man of panache, success, and fame. But always at the stuffy English Bar he is treated with suspicion: where did this blond, louche, brilliant Slav come from? Veneering, Filth, and their friends tell a tale of love, friendship, grace, the bittersweet experiences of a now-forgotten empire, and the disappointments and consolations of age.
©2013 Jane Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Missing the Midnight
Summary
Jane Gardam reveals again her brilliant diversity and deep understanding of the human condition. In "Light", an evocative, lyrical piece of magic realism, a beautiful Himalayan girl defies the destiny laid out for her by her mother but in so doing destroys the village in which she was born. In "Missing the Midnight", a young woman, having failed her exams and lost the man she loves, journeys home on Christmas Eve to the family she despises. In "Grace" an apparently ordinary man lives his whole life with a diamond under his skin at the back of his neck and dies when it is finally removed. Jane Gardam weaves strange and magical occurrences into the fabric of beautifully realised lives in this stunning collection.
©1997 Jenny Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Ltd
Bell und Harry
Summary
Ein wundervoller Sommerroman - die Geschichte einer bedingungslosen Freundschaft London ist laut und anstrengend, die Batemans sehnen sich nach Ruhe und haben sich für den Sommer auf dem Land in Yorkshire eingemietet. Vor allem der Vater, ein nervöser Journalist, hofft auf Entspannung in der bäuerlichen Umgebung. Hier trifft sein kleiner Sohn Harry auf Bell, den jüngsten Sohn der Vermieter, und eine tiefe Jungenfreundschaft beginnt. Sommer für Sommer und mit jedem gemeinsam erlebten Abenteuer wird diese Freundschaft erneuert, so unterschiedlich die Sphären, in denen sie mit ihren Familien leben, auch sind. Eine hell leuchtende Feriengeschichte von Jane Gardam, die die Spannung zwischen Stadt- und Landmenschen mit so viel Weisheit und Humor einfängt.
©2019 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co KG, München. Übersetzung von Isabel Bogdan (P)2019 Hörbuch Hamburg HHV GmbH, Hamburg
Die Leute von Privilege Hill
Summary
Dass Jane Gardam hinreißende Romane schreibt, war eine der wunderbaren Entdeckungen der letzten Jahre. Nun gibt es einen weiteren Schatz zu heben, Gardams Erzählungen: Hetty, die Familienmutter, die bei der Begegnung mit ihrem ehemaligen Liebhaber in einen somnambulen Zustand gerät. Der verstummte chinesische Junge, der einen vom Himmel gestürzten Schwan rettet und zur Sprache zurückfindet. Sie alle berühren uns und entwickeln ein Eigenleben, das über den Kosmos der Geschichten hinausgeht. Und in jeder Erzählung steckt die Verheißung eines ganzen Romans! In deiner Audible-Bibliothek findest du für dieses Hörerlebnis eine PDF-Datei mit zusätzlichem Material.
©2017 Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co KG, München (P)2017 Hörbuch Hamburg HHV GmbH, Hamburg
Old Filth
Summary
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an 80-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever-mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep that retraces much of the 20th century's torrid and momentous history.
©2004 Jane Gardam (P)2020 Recorded Books
The Hollow Land
Summary
The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bill and Harry, two children who find wonder at every turn as they experience the Hollow Land. Everyday challenges give a daring edge to this rural work and play. There are mysteries to explore and uncover, like the case of the Egg Witch, and everyone is curious about the Household Name, a visitor from London, moving into the jewel of the territory, Light Farm. Gardam is at her best with this novel, which won the Whitbread award in 1981.
©1981 Jane Gardam (P)2020 Hachette Audio UK
A Long Way from Verona
Summary
'I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine'. Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her - a confining world of wartime restrictions, Viyella dresses, nicely restrained essays, and dusty tea shops. For Jessica has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt' a born writer. With her inability to conform, her absolute compulsion to tell the truth, and her dedication to accurately noting her experiences, she knows this anyway. But what she doesn't know is that the experiences that sustain and enrich her burgeoning talent will one day lead to a new - and entirely unexpected - reality.
©1971 Jane Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
Faith Fox
Summary
When sweet, healthy, hearty Holly Fox dies suddenly in childbirth, the Surrey village reverberates with shock. She leaves behind a helpless, silent husband and a tiny daughter, Faith.
Everyone assumes Holly's loving and capable mother will look after Faith, but when she unaccountably deserts her newborn grandchild, the baby must be packed off to her father's peculiar family in the North...
©1996 Jane Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
HiBrow: The Folio Prize Fiction Festival
Summary
The three-day Folio Prize Fiction Festival 2014 brought together some great writers and audiences and gave them a real opportunity to talk in depth about their work and similar subjects. The festival included interviews and discussions with top writers, novelists, poets, critics and publishers, including Eimear McBride, Paul Baggaley, Sergio De La Pava, Rachel Kushner, Sarah Hall, Pankaj Mishra, Stephanie Merritt, Jane Gardam and Mark Haddon.
©2018 One Media iP Ltd (P)2018 One Media iP Ltd
The Man in the Wooden Hat
Summary
Acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical series that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s. As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the 50-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be experienced and loved and recommended by all the many thousands who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and thoroughly satisfying.
©2009 Jane Gardam (P)2020 Recorded Books
Bilgewater
Summary
Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.
©1976 Jane Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Inc.
God on the Rocks
Summary
During one glorious summer between the wars, the realities of life and the sexual ritual dance of the adult world creep into the life of young Margaret Marsh. Her father, preaching the doctrine of the unsavoury Primal Saints; her mother, bitterly nostalgic for what might have been; Charles and Binkie, anchored in the past and a game of words; dying Mrs Frayling and Lydia the maid, given to the vulgar enjoyment of life - all contribute to Margaret's shattering moment of truth. And when the storm breaks, it is not only God who is on the rocks as the summer hurtles towards drama, tragedy and a touch of farce.
©2008 Jenny Gardam (P)2014 Audible, Ltd