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The Girl with All the Gifts
- Narrated by: Finty Williams
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
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The Girl with All the Gifts
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Summary
Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2014
Not every gift is a blessing.
Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her 'our little genius'.
Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh.
Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favourite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up.
Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.
Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, The Girl with all the Gifts is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will listen to this year.
The phenomenal word-of-mouth best seller The Girl with all the Gifts is now a major film on widespread distribution starring Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine.
Critic reviews
"Brilliant... Gripping right to the end." ( Sunday Times best-selling author Carole Matthews)
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What listeners say about The Girl with All the Gifts
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Simon
- 19-01-14
A stunning read
Any additional comments?
Having listened to hundreds of audiobooks, this is the first review that I've written … and I'm doing so only because my opinion is so at odds with the two-and-a-half stars that this book has been awarded so far.
I found this a thoroughly gripping and thought-provoking tale; a highly original take on, to be honest, a somewhat hackneyed genre. (I won't mention the genre, as the part of the joy is the gradual unfolding of the protagonist's identity.)
The characters are satisfyingly rounded and the plot both engaging and pacey. From the outset through to the final few minutes, I had no idea of the book's conclusion and, when it finally came, I was far from disappointed.
Mention must also go to Finty Williams for some beautiful characterisation and a warm and textured performance.
So, if I’m waxing so lyrical about this production, why has it been so poorly received elsewhere? Well, I have to admit that it's not the book I had anticipated; and this is due to the necessarily vague publisher’s description. (As I mentioned earlier, giving too much away at the beginning would leach the joy from the first section of the book). So, like me, perhaps other listeners didn’t end up with the book they’d anticipated but, unlike me, found themselves in too much of an unfamiliar setting to enjoy their surroundings.
So, without giving too much away, what you get in the box is a somewhat bleak post-apocalyptic drama, laced with plenty of warmth to balance the grit and revolving around an intriguingly textured central character. I hope that you find the surprises as pleasing as I did.
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193 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Robyn
- 21-06-14
worth it
I really struggle sometimes to find a book that hits the spot. Having been spoiled with Sanderson and Rothfuss, whose epic fantasies tick every box, it's regularly hard to find a viable alternative. This book was it. Not a true fantasy by my standards, rather it's of the apocalyptic variety.
Enough new stuff to keep me interested - and keep me thinking. Well written too. One of those books that will stay with me for many years, I'm sure.
It has a slight shock factor - probably hits different people at different stages. Well narrated.
Certainly worth a credit - even if not your normal genre.
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87 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mara
- 22-01-14
STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING AND DOWNLOAD THIS BOOK
If you could sum up The Girl with All the Gifts in three words, what would they be?
time to think
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Girl with All the Gifts?
My house has never been so clean, I made up jobs to carry on listening, The whole concept of what we could become
Any additional comments?
I have not stopped thinking about the play of characters since I finished this. I forgot time and place and lost myself in this book.
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71 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Krys
- 21-01-14
Couldn't stop listening
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Yes, definitely. You immediately get drawn into the main characters and I finished the book in 24 hrs
Who was your favorite character and why?
Actually the teacher. I found her to be both likeable and naive.
What about Finty Williams’s performance did you like?
The pace of the narration was perfect as was the pitch. I was extremely content to listen for hours on end.
Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Yes. I cried at the end. Not giving anything away but it was a satisfactory ending.
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36 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mr. S. D. Cooper
- 24-01-14
Cracking Story
Any additional comments?
An unexpected story, I wouldn't normally listen to a book where the main character is a child, but this was a real surprise as a fast moving story with an original theme
Well worth a read !
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27 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Beccameriel
- 23-11-14
....but I don't even LIKE zombie stories
I really don't like zombies; they are the least interesting baddies as far as I'm concerned. I got this book because of several reviewers (who've not let me down in the past) said they'd had the same reservation but had ended up loving it.
The story drops you right in the middle of events without exposition and the situation is gradually revealed. I liked that two of the main protagonists are middle aged women (their ages aren't mentioned but given the time scale of events they must both be over 40), and one of them a black woman. It makes a welcome change to have a slightly more diverse set of characters. I really like the characterisation too; everyone has reasons for behaving as they do and there's a bit with Gallagher that nearly made me cry.
There is violence and some gore but it's not gross or over the top.
Finty Williams is excellent particularly as Melanie.
I hope they make a film of this; I started mentally casting it almost straight away.
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20 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Wras
- 28-04-14
A good old fashion end beginning of.......
Good plot, likeable characters; delivered by a great reader, that brings it all to life. I found it hard to put down and heard the entire story in one day.
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16 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sal
- 02-02-14
An interesting twist on a horror classic.
I loved everything about this book. The story was gripping from start to finish, the characterisation pulled me in from the beginning and Carey rapidly built a world I wanted to know more about. The genre was familiar but this was such a different take that it never felt clichéd, and the very British nature of the story also made it more haunting for me. And the ending - perfect.
I had never heard this narrator before but she captured the voices and the tone perfectly and really added to the novel.
I admit that I was sad that there was no new Felix Castor but if this is an example of what we can expect from Carey in the future then I'm very happy indeed.
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14 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Victoria Hulland
- 04-06-14
Unexpectedly addictive, unexpectedly different.
What do you get if you stick a scientist, a soldier (or 2), an humanitarian and a Zombie together in a race for survival? Answer...The girl with all the Gifts.
Like many zombie stories this book is set in a post apocalyptic world. Military rules and regulations apply to assure survival and in the middle of it all is Melanie who is about to discover her place in this forsaken world.
The difference with this book is that this is just the beginning. It's not all about how the world got taken over by zombies, death by gory death. It's about what happened after...decades after, and I found this a breath of fresh air in what is considered a over done genre.
This book is never at risk of being too unrealistic. It has tension and gore and at times quite chilling moments that made me uncomfortable to be listening alone. But it is all written so matter-of-factly that you do not doubt that, should this world become ridden with the un-dead, this is of course what would happen, it is the natural order of things when humans have been bottom of the food chain for 20 years.
With only a small character base you get to know all of them well and you know by the end of the book who you like, who you really like and who your really really don't like.
I was also pleased with the ending. I have read too many books recently that try to leave the ending to the readers imagination. I feel robbed of a conclusion most of the time and feel disappointed in the author for not having the courage of their convictions and following through to the end, whether people like their choice of ending or not. The girl with all the gifts gives an ending that I personally felt complemented the story brilliantly and I have been recommending it to anyone I know since I started reading it.
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13 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- ronx59
- 21-03-14
Delivers
There are some books that defy categorisation. This could be described as a genre story, and the genre will be very familiar to some listeners. The joy is the completely unexpected and fresh angle this book takes on every familiar story beat. Its not just that this is a new perspective on a familiar type of story, it pulls off an extraordinary feat in making that story both horribly believable and peopled with totally realised and imagined characters with complex emotions. And the writing is both spare and elegant in its power but lyrical and poetic in its description. Really good. And Finty Williams is a reader I will now seek out just for the pleasure of her performance.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mariechen
- 06-02-16
Wholly Unique
Would you consider the audio edition of The Girl with All the Gifts to be better than the print version?
I haven't read the print version, but I thoroughly enjoyed the audio. There were some fantastic quotables that I would have liked to underline or at least page back to, but otherwise I'm quite satisfied.
Have you listened to any of Finty Williams’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No, but I enjoyed this performance.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Carey writes so touchingly about Melanie that my heart wants to break. I adore how she gets the reader closer and closer to her characters. The characters are also fallible, and sometimes downright unlikeable, but generally not stereotypically so. They seem human. Sometimes Dr Caldwell seemed a bit like the Mad Scientist stereotype, though...
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Jefferson
- 01-10-16
"I won't hurt you. I just want to examine you."
Ten-year-old Melanie thinks she's a normal girl (maybe a little better at maths and myths than her classmates) who'll grow up to be a princess and to maybe rescue her beloved teacher Miss Justineau from monsters. To Miss Justineau, Melanie is a special child. To Sergeant Parks, she is a dangerous monster. To Private Gallagher, she is uncanny. To Dr. Caldwell, she is Test Subject Number 1.
That complexity is one of the virtues of M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), a zombie genre retelling of the Greek myth about Pandora (whose name, Melanie explains, means "the girl with all the gifts"). All five point of view characters are right and wrong about Melanie, and reading to find out if and how they'll learn they're wrong and right is a suspenseful pleasure--if pleasure is the right word for a story set in a near future twenty years after a parasitic fungus mutated so as to colonize human hosts, commandeering their nervous systems and consuming their brains to turn people into "hungries," virtually mindless predators driven to eat raw meat to provide protein to the fungus, resulting in "the Breakdown" of civilization and the probable eventual extinction of homo sapiens.
Narrated from Melanie's point of view, the first three of seventy-four chapters recall Never Let Me Go, for she is confined to a place with her life organized around classes, and her fellow pupils and she are destined for a special terminal purpose, which her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, is finding increasingly difficult to deal with. Melanie and her classmates live in small individual cells on a kind of military base. Despite not being free to leave the cellblock, despite not even being able to leave her cell unless she's strapped head and foot to a wheel chair, Melanie has picked up various clues about her world from what her teachers and to Sergeant Parks, who's in charge of the kids' confinement, say. But she still doesn't quite know what she is.
After a band of "junkers," "survivalist assholes" who live by scavenging, pay the base a call, the novel kicks into high page-turning gear. Although Carey includes some typical zombie genre tropes (e.g., the old trapped in a house surrounded by zombies situation), he does most everything with a refreshing, unsparing, and convincing authenticity, while adding enough surprises and fresh takes on the typical tropes to make his book bracing. And because we care about his characters, it's all very suspenseful.
Yes, the strongest part of this novel is its convincing point of view characters, each with their own personal history shaping and driving them, often in conflict with others: Miss Justineau (psychologist brought in to study the children's emotional responses and cognitive processes), Dr. Caldwell (uber scientist out to save homo sapiens via vivisection), scar-faced Sergeant Parks (essential soldier aiming to do his job), Private Gallagher (hapless, gormless, sweet). And wonderful Melanie of course. She wishes her name were Pandora, because she has learnt that Pandora didn't only release harmful things into the world but also some good things and figures that Pandora shouldn't be blamed because Zeus made her with curiosity and set up the whole trap. She's like any kid sensually experiencing and building an overwhelming new world around herself--and she's something very different. She has great presence and poise, fears and bravery.
Carey works in plenty of allusions to Greek/Roman myths (like Acteon) and legends (like The Aeneid). And his similes/metaphors are apt, telling, vivid, fresh, sometimes humorous.
--"The laugh you'd make if you rubbed out a mistake in a sum and accidentally tore the paper."
--"Her first taste of blood and warm flesh gives her a rush of pleasure bigger than she is… the part of her that can think bends in the cataract of mindless pleasure and hunger, and she goes on eating, feeling like a torrent of waterfall poured in a cup."
--Hungries standing still in different stages of decomposition "look like they're posing for paintings."
--"a fine fractal froth" of spores.
It is not a horror fantasy novel so much as a science fiction suspense novel. The biology of the fungus is convincingly detailed, with plenty of scientific language and behavior. As with much of the best sf, it comments on how we live now: "It's like before the breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find."
And the ending! It is perfect: surprising, inevitable, disturbing, and moving.
The audiobook is finely read by Flinty Williams. She is the kind of reader who doesn't try to perform vocal gymnastics to differentiate among different characters, but only slightly lowers or raises her voice for men or kids, etc., and just reads every word and sentence with pitch perfect pronunciation, pacing, and emphasis. And she has an appealing British accent, voice, and manner.
People who like the zombie genre's potential and are willing to sample its more intelligent and original examples, like Daryl Gregory's Raising Stony Mayhall (2011), should like this book. (Refreshingly, it doesn't appear to be the first in a series.)
**Note: Just because one of the main characters is ten years old, don't think that this is exactly a YA book: its attack on human pride may be disturbing, and many scenes are graphic.**
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- DebB
- 02-09-14
Fabulous!
I listen to a lot of audiobooks, in lots of different genres, and every now and then you come across one that is extra good. And I have to say 'The Girl with Al the Gifts' is really quite wonderful.
It's really well written, and the narration is perfect. I loved everything about it!
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Marie Linde Kruger
- 09-05-20
excellent
not a dull moment in the whole story, simply fantastic in every way! definitely recommend
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Nicky Furniss
- 13-05-19
Excellent, gripping story from start to end
Narrator was superb, as was the story. Made this genre accessible even for those who may not usually choose to read this kind of book. Riveting. I raced through it, but now wish there was more!
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Eszter
- 17-06-15
Strong start, ultimately disappointing finish
A good performance by the narrator and fairly well written - but the story fell flat in the end as a lot of the theory didn't stack up.
I dont know how to explain it without giving away the whole story - but the girl, who is the one with 'all the gifts' is a product of a particular event...and the whole crux of the story is completely undermined by the final scenes. So while you're meant to be shaken by the dramatic ending, to me it didn't add up at all. Meh.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Edva
- 22-02-14
Wonderful
This book is the proof that it doesn't matter what the subject is, what's important is the writing. If you have to choose one book to read this year, this should be it.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Yoav Moran
- 23-05-21
A page turner (or audio binger?) indeed
This is one of the more original stories I've heard. it reveals itself slowly, with surprise, suspense and emotions on each step.
couldn't recommend it enough.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Zuhal
- 18-08-20
The best zombie story
I have been in love with this story since hearing the short story version of it (Iphigenia at Aulis, please listen to or read it as well for a slightly different but equally amazing story!)
The characterization, the premise, the dynamics - all beautifully crafted.
Finty Williams is a terrific narrator.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Tac
- 25-04-19
Holy crap!! The end was AMAZING!!
The end to thIs book took it from a 8/10 to a 10/10!!I highly recommend this book!!
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