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To Kill a Mockingbird
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Some narrators read books; Marin Ireland inhabits them, and pairing her with Fredrik Backman, fiction's reigning specialist in finding the ache inside the joke, is the kind of casting that makes audiobook people clear their calendars. My Friends is Backman's novel about a painting: specifically, the three tiny figures at the end of a pier in a famous artwork, the teenagers they were twenty-five years ago, and the eighteen-year-old who inherits the painting now and goes looking for the truth of it. It is, and we say this having covered a lot of emotional fiction on this site, one of the most quietly devastating things he has written.
Two timelines. Then: one summer, four teenagers, each from a home that fails them in its own way, find in each other the family they were owed, and one of them paints what that felt like. Now: Louisa, an eighteen-year-old artist with nothing, is handed the painting by a dying man and unspools the story of that summer, what art preserves, what friendship survives, and what happened on the pier. Backman's signature moves are all present, the aphoristic asides, the comic misdirection before the gut-punch, but the material about art as testimony, about making something so the summer actually happened, is new territory, and it is the best writing in the book.
Ireland, among the most decorated narrators working, reads Backman's omniscient, essayistic voice with the timing of a favorite storyteller, patient on the jokes, unhurried at the cliff edges, and gives the four teenagers distinct, lived-in registers without pushing. Her handling of the book's hardest material, and there is genuinely hard material here, abuse and grief among it, is a masterclass in trusting the text. Thirteen hours pass like an evening with someone who knows exactly when to pause.
Well narrated? Ireland on Backman is a landmark pairing, patient, precise, devastating. A novel about why we make art at all, and among the finest listens of its year. Keep tissues within reach; you will need them twice.
The Midnight Library for another life-and-what-it-is-for listen, or Where the Crawdads Sing for atmospheric fiction that trusts its narrator.
Marin Ireland narrates the Simon & Schuster Audio edition, one of the most acclaimed narrators in the format taking on Backman's storyteller voice.
No, it is a fully standalone novel, no Beartown or Ove connections, and it works as a first Backman as well as a tenth.
It is Backman: you will laugh genuinely and cry genuinely, sometimes on the same page. The book deals with abuse, loss, and grief among its four teenagers, but its destination is gratitude rather than despair.
About 13 hours 7 minutes, unhurried by design, and Ireland's pacing makes the length feel like the point rather than a cost.
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