Some books feel so suited to the audio format that they could have been written with the voice in mind. All My Precious Madness is one of those. Mark Bowles’s debut novel, which won the audiobook fiction category at the inaugural British Audio awards (where, full disclosure, I was a judge), is a deliciously sweary monologue from a middle-aged malcontent.
A sideways reflection on working-class identity and masculinity, the novel gives voice to Henry Nash, a man of little patience. Sitting in a London coffee shop and trying to write a monograph of his father, he rains judgment on the other patrons whose obnoxious phone calls he can’t help but overhear. An Oxford graduate turned writer and academic, Nash lives in a Soho flat where he has been known to furtively drop eggs on passersby who disturb him with their drunken racket.
Along with rants about business jargon and city hipsters, he recalls scenes from his working-class childhood in Bradford and his university days, where he struggled to fit in with his public school-educated peers and “where I wore my learning, such as it was, like a trenchcoat on a summer’s day”. But since then, Henry has grown comfortable with academia and decries the anti-intellectual English, “who hate anything which doesn’t return them to the prosaic and the everyday”.
The narrator is the actor Paul Hilton, who brilliantly inhabits this hopeless grouch and conveys his many contradictions. That Nash seems to hold his fellow humans in contempt makes him sound like dreadful company. But his complexity and charisma become increasingly evident the more time we spend with him.
• Available from Spiracle, 8hr 25min
Further listening
From Here to the Great Unknown
Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough, Macmillan, 5hr 40min
The autobiography of the late Lisa Marie Presley, written from tapes she had recorded telling the story of her life, is narrated by her daughter Lisa Marie Presley and Julia Roberts. The book discusses her addictions, her marriage to Michael Jackson and her memories of her father Elvis.
The Best of Everything
Kit de Waal, Tinder, 7hr 46min
Sara Powell narrates this story of a woman learning to live after a devastating loss. Paulette’s partner is killed in a car crash, and it’s only after his death that she learns he had a secret family.
