MOTHERTRUCKER written and read by Amy Butcher - audiobook extract

12/02/21 • 5 min

Amy Butcher was an accomplished college professor, mentor and writer, but in her own home, she was embarrassed and emotionally burdened by an increasingly abusive relationship. Exhausted and terrified of the ways her partner's behaviour could escalate, Amy reached out to Instagram celebrity Joy 'Mothertrucker' Wiebe. Joy was a 50-year-old wife and mother and the nation's only female ice road trucker, a woman who maneuvered big rigs through the Alaskan wilderness along the deadliest road in America. Joy was everything Amy wanted to be: independent, fearless and in charge of her life in a landscape dominated by men. Invited by Joy to ride shotgun, Amy found her escape on a road that was treacherous, beautiful and exhilarating. Mothertrucker is the story of that bracing 400-mile journey navigating snow-glazed overpasses, ice-blue curves and near plummets. Soon to be a major film starring Julianne Moore.

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PRIVATE FACES AND PUBLIC PLACES written and read by Sian Phillips - audiobook extract

The remarkably honest and brilliantly entertaining memoir of one of our finest acting Dames whose long and celebrated career includes her much-loved performance as Livia in I, Claudius and who was married for 20 years to the hell-raising Hollywood star Peter O'Toole. Siân Phillips has a long and celebrated career on both stage and screen. For the first time, her two best-selling volumes of memoir, Private Faces and Public Places, will be available as a single volume with a brand new foreword by the author. With wonderful stories and unflinching candour, Private Faces and Public Places covers her life from its beginnings in the remote Welsh countryside, where life hadn't changed for centuries, to finding herself at the epicentre of the acting world at its most glamorous alongside husband Peter O'Toole, whose career was about to take off with the spellbinding Lawrence of Arabia. Siân describes the mad and wonderfully impulsive times with O'Toole alongside the tempestuous, insecure and often lonely periods in their marriage. Incredibly, it endures over 20 years. When it ends, surprising even herself, she plunges straight into another marriage, with the much younger actor Robin Sachs. Emerging alone from her second marriage, triumphant and unrepentant, the story Siân tells ranks alongside the very best in show business.

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THE UNDISCOVERED DEATHS OF GRACE MCGILL by C.S. Robertson, read by Lauren Lyle - audiobook extract

Grace McGill is an insular, friendless woman, living in Glasgow in her 30s. She has her beloved cat, and she has her own business - deep cleaning the houses of Undiscovereds. People who die alone and stay that way until they are found weeks, sometimes months, later. While working in the home of a man named Tommy Agnew, her suspicions are aroused by a hidden photograph and a stack of newspapers, all from the same date over many, many years. Grace can't get the mysterious life and sad death of Tommy Agnew out of her head, and she soon begins an investigation that could cost her her life. The past has stayed buried for many years already, but Grace has never been one to brush things under the carpet.... A stand-out novel with a unique narrative voice and an unguessable mystery. You are guaranteed to remember Grace McGill.