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The Truth About These Strange Times

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The Truth About These Strange Times

By: Adam Foulds
Narrated by: Colin Moody
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About this listen

Saul Dawson-Smith can memorise the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute; he can recite pi to a thousand decimal places and he remembers every conversation he's ever had. He is 10-years-old.

Howard McNamee is 28: lonely, overweight and poorly-educated. He lives in the north of England, far from the scene of his difficult Glasgow childhood, in the home he shared with his mother before she died.

Through a series of unexpected events, these two solitary people find themselves forming an unlikely friendship, as Howard is taken under the wing of Saul's parents, thrust into a life in London (where he makes new friends, tries to navigate a bewildering new city, and accidentally acquires a Russian internet fiancée) and Saul prepares himself for the World Memory Championships – the event he has been training for his whole life.

©2007 Adam Foulds. (P)2009 Bolinda Publishing Contemporary Fiction Genre Fiction England Feel-Good

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Editor reviews

Colin Moody heightens the humor and the drama in this quirky contemporary novel with his droll and empathic performance of Adam Foulds' debut The Truth About These Strange Times. Listeners will be enchanted with this chronicle of a peculiar friendship between Howard McNamee, a lonely 28-year-old mourning his mother's ghost, and Saul Dawson-Smith, a 10-year-old with a photographic memory. In sparkling prose, these two outsiders navigate London, their relationships with Saul's parents, and the expectations placed on them by the society they inhabit.

Critic reviews

'A stylish debut novel of bittersweet humour.' (The Good Book Guide)
'This is a novel bursting with incident, humour, humanity and literary promise.' (The Sunday Times)
'Accomplished and confident...there is much to admire in this debut, from the assured descriptions to the well-judged blend of comedy and drama.' (The Times)
'An unusual debut novel about a road trip that defies all expectations.' (The Herald)
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This was a bit of a strange story, where you kept hoping the main character would get things right and everything kept going wrong. It was worth listening to, but I found it all a bit depressing in the end. Some good funny bits and some good characters. The narration was pretty good, but sometimes the narrator got a bit muddled with the accents!

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