LISTENING STILL by Anne Griffin, read by Nicola Coughlan - audiobook extract

04/29/21 • 5 min

The new novel by the best-selling author of When All is Said. From the best-selling author of When All is Said comes a delicious new novel about a young woman who can hear the dead - a talent which is both a gift and a curse. Jeanie Masterson has a gift: she can hear the recently dead and give voice to their final wishes and revelations. Inherited from her father, this gift has enabled the family undertakers to flourish in their small Irish town. Yet she has always been uneasy about censoring some of the dead's last messages to the living. Unsure, too, about the choice she made when she left school seventeen years ago: to stay or leave for a new life in London with her charismatic teenage sweetheart. So when Jeanie's parents unexpectedly announce their plan to retire, she is jolted out of her limbo. In this captivating successor to her bestselling debut, Anne Griffin portrays a young woman who is torn between duty, a comfortable marriage and a role she both loves and hates and her last chance to break free, unaware she has not been alone in softening the truth for a long while.

Previous Episode

WHERE THE WILD THINGS GROW by David Hamilton, read by Matthew Spencer - audiobook extract

Nestled by the roadside, peeking through the hedgerows, hidden in the woods and even in city streets and parks, wild food is all around us - if you know where to look. From woodland mushrooms and riverbank redcurrants to garden weeds and urban cherry blossoms, Where the Wild Things Grow takes us on a journey through the forager's landscape. Drawing on 25 years of foraging experience, David Hamilton show us how and where to hunt for the food that is hidden all around us. Along the way he delves into the forgotten histories and science of wild foods and their habitats and reveals his many foraging secrets, tips and recipes. You'll discover where to find mallows, mustards and pennywort, as well as sumac, figs and mulberries. You'll learn how to pick the sweetest berries, preserve mushrooms using only a radiator and prepare salads, risottos and puddings all with wild food. In all weathers, landscapes and seasons, David shows us that foraging doesn't just introduce us to new tastes and sensations, it also brings us closer to the natural world on our doorstep. Beautifully illustrated and rich in detail, Where the Wild Things Grow is more than a field guide - it is a celebration of the wonderful and fragile gifts hidden in our landscape.

Next Episode

KNOW THYSELF by Stephen M. Fleming, read by George Weightman - audiobook extract

You've probably had that baffling experience of trying and failing to remember someone's name - even you when you know you know it. Or maybe you've pulled into your driveway and realised you had no recollection of the drive you just took. Or perhaps you've failed a test that you were certain you'd ace. Why are we so often wrong about what we know? How can we do something as difficult as driving without thinking about it? And how is it possible to know you've forgotten something? Underlying these experiences is a complex process called metacognition - the ability to think about what we and others do or don't think and know. Though you may not have heard of it, metacognition is the key to bridging our understanding of consciousness and intelligence and enables our astonishing abilities both as individuals and as a group. Know Thyself is Cognitive Neuroscientist Stephen Fleming's unprecedented, definitive and endlessly fascinating examination of this essential human ability. Drawing on his own pioneering studies as well as exciting new insights from computer science, psychology and evolutionary biology, Fleming explores why we so often think we're amazing at tasks that we're terrible at, what role computers and AI should play in our lives and how we can harness the science of metacognition to think more clearly, make better decisions and optimise learning inside and outside of the classroom. Not only will understanding metacognition make you less likely to misplace the car keys, but, as Fleming demonstrates, it has far-reaching implications for the use of eyewitness accounts in courtrooms, combating misinformation and our understanding of what it means to be human in the age of intelligent machines. For fans of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, Know Thyself is a groundbreaking work of scholarship that sheds new light on how to be a self-aware human in our modern world.