Audiobook8 hours
Every Day Is Mother's Day
Written by Hilary Mantel
Narrated by Sandra Duncan
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
()
About this audiobook
Evelyn Axon is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature. Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field. Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him. But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again--how is he going to run anywhere? As Isabel wrestles with her own problems, a horrible secret grows in the darkness of the Axon household. When at last it comes to light, the result is by turns hilarious and terrifying.
Author
Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel is the author of seventeen books, including A Place of Greater Safety, Beyond Black, the memoir Giving Up the Ghost and the short story collection The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Her latest novel, The Mirror & the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, while Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were both awarded the Booker Prize.
More audiobooks from Hilary Mantel
Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learning to Talk: Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Every Day Is Mother's Day
Rating: 3.25 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
4 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Evelyn Axon is an aging medium who lives with her mentally disabled daughter Muriel in a deteriorating Victorian house with a run-down lean-to out back. Muriel’s latest social worker, Isabel Field, is having an affair with the history teacher Colin Sidney, whose sister Florence is one of the Axon’s neighbors. Will Colin leave his wife and three bratty children for Isabel? What is haunting the Axon house? And who made Muriel pregnant? By turns creepy and funny, Mantel’s first published novel is intelligent and eminently readable.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In Every Day is Mother's Day Hilary Mantel gives us Colin Sidney, a dissatisfied history teacher who attends evening classes on subjects he has no interest in, just to get away from his wife and children for a few hours. He and his wife never seem to have a conversation that isn't contentious, and the children are sticky horrid little monsters with no hint of individual personalities (in short, quite unlike real children in my experience, where even the horrid ones are "people".) During a creative writing class (in which he writes nothing) Colin latches on to an inept social worker named Isabel who has no life either, and they embark on a hopeless little affair. One of Isabel's clients is Muriel Axon, a slightly retarded woman who lives with her mother, coincidentally next door to Colin's sister. Muriel and her mother are equally deranged, but in rather different ways, and what they get up to, grim as it all is, can be blackly humorous. Hilary Mantel has a monumental talent; her writing carries you along and keeps you engaged in the story, even when you don't particularly like the story. The best part of this book was a lengthy scene in which Colin and his pregnant wife arrive late at a dinner party hosted by the head of his department, to find that everyone there is already half pickled on the free booze, and well into a routine of head games to which Colin is very reluctant witness. It's a brilliant bashing of academic "types" who have no real interest in anything and find their only pleasures in intoxication and one-ups-manship. I can't say I greatly enjoyed the book overall, but parts of it made the whole worth reading.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5It was very understated. I kept waiting for something to happen besides phone calls.