ALL MY WILD MOTHERS by Victoria Bennett, read by Fenella Fudge - audiobook extract

01/27/23 • 1 min

An intimate weaving of memoir and herbal folklore, All My Wild Mothers is a story of rewilding our wastelands and the transformation that can happen when we do. At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood and all that was to come. But when the telephone rang, the news she received changed everything. Her eldest sister had died in a canoeing accident. Five years later, struggling with grief, the demands of being a parent-carer for her young son, and the impact of deeper austerity, life feels very different to the future she had imagined. A move to a new social housing estate in rural Cumbria offers Victoria and her family a chance to rebuild their lives. Constructed over an industrial site, at first the barren ground seems an unlikely place to sow the seeds of a new life. She and her son set about transforming the rubble around them into a wild apothecary garden. Daisy, for resilience. Dandelion, for strength against adversity. Red campion, to ward off loneliness. Sow thistle, to lift melancholy. Borage, to bring hope in dark and difficult times. Stone by stone, seed by seed, All My Wild Mothers is the story of how sometimes life grows, not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.

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END OF STORY by Louise Swanson, read by Sophie Bentinck - audiobook extract

It's the year 2035 and fiction has been banned by the government for five years. Writing novels is a crime. Reading fairytales to children is punishable by law. Fern Dostoy is a criminal. Officially, she has retrained in a new job outside of the arts but she still scrawls in a secret notepad in an effort to capture what her life has become: her work on a banned phone line, reading bedtime stories to sleep-starved children; Hunter, the young boy who calls her and has captured her heart; and the dreaded visits from government officials. But as Fern begins to learn more about Hunter, doubts begin to surface. What are they both hiding? And who can be trusted?

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IN THE UPPER COUNTRY by Kai Thomas, read by Milton Barnes, Tymika Tafari & Wesley French

Freedom, you can't get and bury, and keep it and keep it so it won't ever go away. No, child. You got to swing your freedom like a club. In 1859, in a small town jail, deep in the forests of Canada, an elderly woman sits behind bars. She came to Dunmore via the Underground Railroad to escape enslavement, but an American bounty hunter tracked her down. Now she's in jail for killing him. Lensinda Martin, a smart young reporter, wants to tell the woman's version of events, hoping that it will lead to her acquittal, but the woman will only tell her story on one condition: she gets one from Lensinda in return. As the women swap stories—of family and first loves, of survival and freedom against all odds, it becomes apparent that their histories are interconnected, and a hidden bond between the two women is revealed which will change Lensinda's life forever. Travelling along the path of the Underground Railroad from Virginia to Michigan, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black refugee communities of Canada, In the Upper Country is an unforgettable debut about the interwoven history of peoples in North America, slavery and resistance, and two women reckoning with the stories they've been given, and the ones they want to tell.