Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: All that Follows

Author: Jim Crace

Narrator: William Hope

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-01-11

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Lennie Lessing is a jazzman taking a break. His glory days seem to be behind him, his body is letting him down, and rather than continue to take on the world, he relives old gigs and feeds his media addiction during solitary days at home. Increasingly estranged from his busy wife, Francine, who is herself mourning the sudden absence of her only daughter, Leonard has found his own groove: suburban and safe from surprises. He could continue like this for years. Then comes the news bulletin that threatens to change everything....

Set in England, 2024, and George Bushs Texas, 2006, this hypnotic novel asks what it truly means to love, to believe, and to be courageous.

Members Reviews:

From the sidelines

Leonard Lessing - stage name Lennie Less - is a saxophone player who has lost his zest for playing, lost the zest in his marriage, and lost the zest for engagement. So he's taking a break. An extended one that has his wife increasingly impatient with him, and he knows it. He also knows she is right. Then one day, Lennie sees a face on the news (he's a news and media junkie) that is straight out of the past, and he's jarred. Back in the day....

Well, I should say the novel takes place in a future world, but one not unrecognizable, not too far into the future: 2024. An odd, but interesting choice. That world, 14 years on from our own, hasn't changed all that much, except in subtle ways. Personal freedoms seem to have been reduced, but not so that most people recognize that fact. If the loss of personal freedoms is a creeping loss, then this is what it would look like. "Security" and the forces that keep us "safe" seem to have grown, in the same creeping way. We've (they) have accepted it as the price necessary.

So. Back in the day is 2006, and Lennie had spent some time in Austin, Texas with Max and his girlfriend Nadia in that year. Max had befriended Nadia in England and had his own designs on her, but upon arrival in Austin, he found her living with Max. The three of them were political activists: Max of the radical and confrontational kind, Lennie of the more muted variety, with ""Red" Nadia somewhere between the two. When Max had left Austin (not on the best of terms with either of them), he had not seen them since. But now there was Max on the television, right in the middle of a hostage taking. He decides to go to the scene of the crisis (Max had not yet been identified).

On the way there in his car, he listens to an old concert of his. Here, and elsewhere throughout the book, the writing on music is vivid and informed. These are my favorite parts of the novel. Crace really shows his chops here.

When he arrives, he finds he has been beaten to the identification by Max's estranged daughter, Lucy. Nadia had been pregnant with Lucy when he left Austin. Lennie is talked into a scheme cooked up by Lucy, but backs out before it can be put into action. He gets cold feet, blaming his wife Francine for his reticence. A sofa activist - an acronym that Lucy runs with.

Crace also writes effectively on the relationship between Lennie and his wife, which is complicated, but loving. They bicker a bit, and though it's all a bit stale, it's still a solid marriage. Francine's daughter Celandine from a previous marriage had left the house many months prior, without a word since.