Friday morning was unfolding in the usual way when M saw that Hark had been reviewed as The Guardian’s audiobook of the week. Much of the glamorous-seeming aspects of author life take place in this way.
I was chuffed that Fiona Sturges, who wrote the review, picked out the voicenote that the brilliant team who made the audiobook for Hark decided to include at the top of this chapter about phantom crying - the “babies in the head” that women have experienced for millennia; hearing their children cry when they are silent. While I am very pleased that Fiona Hampton, the actor who has recorded the audiobooks for three of my books, returned to do this one, I have chipped in with snippets of recordings I made on research trips and while writing. I also read the introduction, and there’s a “wonderfully warm” conversation between Fiona and I on what it is to inhabit the words of someone for nearly a decade.
If you like it, you can order the whole audiobook for Hark here; or buy the beautiful hardback.
more on hark
reverberations
While I can’t pinpoint the moment when music began to drift out of my life, I can clearly remember when I finally admitted to myself that I had stopped listening to it.
hark
Hark has taken me to the Arctic Circle in the 19th century, when people listened out for the unlikely crackle of the Aurora Borealis, and to the hulking, lonely monuments of the Sound Mirrors in Denge.
nightingales
This week I returned to Highnam Woods in Gloucestershire, where I went on an all-female nightingale walk last May while researching Hark. This time, I went with Camilla Greenwell, a director and photographer, and Alice Boyd, a musician, storyteller and sound artist, to see if we could hear the nightingales with a view to making a short film about listening. You can find more nightingales, and a lot more about listening, in
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