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The Echo Chamber

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The Echo Chamber

Written by: John Boyne
Narrated by: Richard E. Grant
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

What a thing of wonder a mobile phone is. Six ounces of metal, glass and plastic, fashioned into a sleek, shiny, precious object. At once, a gateway to other worlds - and a treacherous weapon in the hands of the unwary, the unwitting, the inept.

The Cleverley family live a gilded life, little realising how precarious their privilege is, just one tweet away from disaster. George, the patriarch, is a stalwart of television interviewing, a 'national treasure' (his words); his wife, Beverley, a celebrated novelist (although not as celebrated as she would like); and their children, Nelson, Elizabeth, Achilles, various degrees of catastrophe waiting to happen.

Together they will go on a journey of discovery through the Hogarthian jungle of the modern living where past presumptions count for nothing and carefully curated reputations can be destroyed in an instant. Along the way, they will learn how volatile, how outraged, how unforgiving the world can be when you step from the proscribed path.

Powered by John Boyne's characteristic humour and razor-sharp observation, The Echo Chamber is a satiric helter skelter, a dizzying downward spiral of action and consequence, poised somewhere between farce, absurdity and oblivion. To err is maybe to be human but to really foul things up you only need a phone.

©2021 John Boyne (P)2021 Penguin Audio
Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literature & Fiction Comedy
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Just Brilliant!

Boyne has captured perfectly the absurdity and pathos of our current woke culture...one that is fueld by superficial values and easily whipped into a frenzy by social media. At first I was hesitant to get this book because it didn't sound like there would be any characters I'd actually like in it! Which is actually true...but my dislike of them was certainly not so intense that I was turned off of the whole story. In fact, I often found myself sympathizing with these shallow, selfish, befuddled, and morally questionable individuals as they blundered their way through life's challenges. Boyne really is a master observer of human psychology and human society at large.
In addition to the excellent story etc. the actual reading of it was also top notch! just excellent! This audiobook is totally worth the credit and then some.

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Hilarious!

Incredible narration, it added so much to the story overall. This really is an excellent commentary on how vacuous and silly social media is in all its forms. This novel, like The Heart’s Invisible Furies, is what makes John Boyne one of the best authors out there.

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Delicious!

John Boyne's satiric prose is wielded with wicked precision at the miasma social media has become in the 21st century. I came to quickly love the foibles and quirks of the five-person Cleverley family as they move bumblingly through their little lives. Headed by mother Beverley, a world famous 50-something popular romance fiction writer, whose formulaic books are penned by a series of 'ghosts,' each of whom is subsequently taken into the family, then discarded at the conclusion of each assignment, at the rate of one book per year. Her beloved husband George, a 60-year-old life-long television interview host, a fixture at the BBC and close personal friend to multiple generations of the TV-viewing British public, who's about to make his first huge, humiliating stumble at the twitter hands of a vicious social media troll. Their three adult children still live in their childhood home. The eldest is high school teacher and 22-year-old closeted virgin Nelson. He is followed by middle-child, wannabe social media influencer Elizabeth, whose nasty online persona targets blue-tickers, while her public self uses questionably 'charitable acts' as a way to increase the numbers of her follows. Their youngest sibling is Achilles, a 17-year-old pretty boy whose retirement-by-30 scheme involves blackmailing a series of adult males he lures into his web via online dating sites. If this family sounds like a tangled web, it is, and it is also side-splittingly funny. What makes this perfect thing even more perfect is that it has been drolly delivered by Richard E. Grant at his sardonic, eloquent best. I loved every minute of this audiobook. I'll be listening to it again, and I'm also eagerly looking forward to reading more of John Boyne's work!

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