🎧
Romance
Great Big Beautiful Life
0 reviews
View →
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
There is a very specific kind of horror in confessing your most embarrassing secrets to a total stranger on a turbulent flight, secure in the knowledge you will never see them again, only to walk into your office on Monday morning and find that stranger is your company's new, elusive CEO. That premise alone tells you almost everything you need to know about why Can You Keep a Secret? has stayed in print and in audiobook rotation for two decades and inspired a 2019 film.
The scoring:
Kate Reading narrates this original recording, and if the name sounds familiar it is because she is one of audiobook's most prolific and decorated narrators, best known outside romance for her work on The Wheel of Time. Here, she brings the same instinct that makes her fantasy work land, a sense that she is making the story up as she goes rather than reading a fixed script, to Kinsella's dense, specifically British comic voice. Reading has a genuine gift for the genre's regional slang, words like "gobsmacked" and "skivve out" land with the right rhythm and confidence rather than sounding like a narrator working through an unfamiliar phrasebook, which matters enormously for a book this dependent on voice-driven comedy.
Who this is for: listeners who want a specifically British comic voice in their workplace romance, and readers who enjoy an anxious, oversharing protagonist whose humiliations drive the plot rather than derailing it.
Who this is not for: listeners who prefer American-set contemporary romance or find secondhand embarrassment genuinely difficult to sit through; Emma's cascading confessions are the entire engine of the book's early chapters.
No, it is a standalone novel, separate from Sophie Kinsella's better-known Shopaholic series.
Yes, a 2019 film adaptation was released, though it made some changes to the novel's plot and setting.
Yes, more recent editions have been narrated by Emily Gray, but the original and most widely reviewed recording features Kate Reading.
Written by Sophie Kinsella. Narrated by Kate Reading. Browse more Romance audiobooks and ebooks.
No approved reviews yet. Be the first to write one.
