Practice
A Novel
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Practice
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Narrated by:
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Imogen Wilde
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By:
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Rosalind Brown
About this listen
Long-listed, Slate Best Books of the Year, 2024
Long-listed, The Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year, 2024
Long-listed, NPR Best Book of the Year, 2024
An astonishing first novel about a day in the life of a young student who experiences her thoughts, fantasies, and wishes as she writes about—or tries to write about—Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Rosalind Brown's Practice shows us just one day. Annabel, sitting in her small student room, attempts to write an essay about Shakespeare. She follows a meticulous, solitary routine but finds it repeatedly thrown off course as the day progresses: by family and friends who demand her attention and time, by thoughts of her much older boyfriend and his impending visit, by wild sexual fantasies and stories of her own invented characters—and by darker crises, obliquely glimpsed but capable of derailing Annabel's carefully laid plans.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2024 Rosalind Brown (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A fascinating, beautifully wrought theatre of the mind that reminded me by turns of Virginia Woolf and Nicholson Baker.”—Olivia Laing, author of Everybody: A Book about Freedom
“Each sentence is a taut, considered work of art . . . Every thought and distraction . . . is carefully described, and the result is hypnotic as the reader is drawn into Annabel’s world. Almost Virginia Woolf-like in its focus on the passing of time and somewhat reminiscent of the poetic prose of Eimear McBride (A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, 2014), this novel announces a unique and exciting new talent in British fiction.”—Alexander Moran, Booklist
“I had a lot of fun with Practice by Rosalind Brown. I think only she and Proust can get me into the space where I'm happy to read about someone walking across a room for all these pages. You're reading about reading; you have to be really good to do that in a compelling way.”—Helen Oyeyemi, author of Parasol Against the Axe
Talented author; book won’t be for everyone
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