New audiobook titles for May 2023
Treat your ears with these brand new audiobook titles for May 2023, free to listen to on our BorrowBox service with your library card.
Looking for new reading or listening inspiration? Browse our eLibrary recommendations.
Wild Isles, by Patrick Barkham
Wild Isles is a celebration of the wildlife found on a relatively modest collection of islands positioned at a latitude so northerly to be unattractive to many animals and plants. Despite these unpromising foundations, the islands of Britain and Ireland, together with more than 6,000 lesser islets that make up our archipelago, contain some of the most diverse, beautiful and wildlife-rich landscapes and seas on our planet
Each chapter focuses on a particular kind of wild space. Britain and Ireland are dominated by a wide variety of grasslands from lowland water meadows to upland moors, and we will see how these human-shaped, semi-natural landscapes thrum with insect, bird and mammal life. Life requires water to flourish, and streams and rivers carry freshwater through our landscape, creating unique ecosystems and interrelations within and beside these waters, which are revealed in a third section.
While Britain and Ireland's woodlands are comparatively thin on the ground compared with most of continental Europe, we will see some of the forests and trees that remain are unusually ancient and, great repositories of life. Finally, of course, we are surrounded by sea, and our position on the continental shelf before it plunges into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean gives rise to an often overlooked plenty of marine life. A glorious richness divided into five breathtaking sections.
Shy, by Max Porter
Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But again and again he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him.
You mustn't do that to yourself Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that.
He's been kicked out of two schools, been cautioned, arrested, stabbed his stepdad in the finger and bottled a former Tumble Tots playmate, but it's the taunts and teasing of his new schoolmates that haunt Shy. Shy's got no armpit hair / Shy needs fake ID to buy fags / Got your special meds, nutcase?
At Last Chance - a home for 'very disturbed young men' - he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren't getting any better.
The night is huge and it hurts. So tonight he's stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan.
The God Desire, by David Baddiel
David Baddiel would love for there to be a God. He has spent a lot of time fantasising about how much better life would be if there actually was such a thing as a Superhero Dad who chased off Death. Unfortunately for him, there isn’t. Or at least, that is Baddiel’s view in this audiobook, which argues that it is indeed the very intensity of his, and everyone else’s, desire for God to exist that proves His non-existence.
Anything so deeply wished-for, we will, considers Baddiel, make real. The admission of his own divine yearnings makes for an audiobook that is more vulnerable – and more understanding of the value and power of religion – than most atheist polemics. A philosophical essay that utilises Baddiel’s trademarks of comedy, storytelling and personal asides, The God Desire offers a highly new perspective on the most ancient of debates.
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