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Title: Cryer's Hill
Author: Kitty Aldridge
Narrator: Christopher Oxford
Format: Unabridged
Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
Language: English
Release date: 03-16-13
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes
Genres: Fiction, Literary
Publisher's Summary:
A story of love, loss, and space. In July 1934, Walter Brown went alone to the woodland pond. He saw his girl swimming there. He watched her floating and saw how white her skin was in the green water, her belly, her breasts, her pond-tangled hair. Then she turned over like an otter and dived down. She did not come up again. In July 1969, Sean Matthews finds himself in the very same woodland, where he witnesses an event he later cannot bear to remember. Two boys, growing up in the same village 35 years apart, have each seen something they shouldn't.
Hailed by Salman Rushie on the publication of her first novel, Pop, Cryers Hill confirms Kitty Aldridge as a writer of immense talent, possessing the rare gift of enabling us to see the world anew.
Kitty Aldridge was born in the Middle East but grew up in England. A graduate of the Drama Centre, London, she has since worked in theatre, film, and television as an actress and writer.
Critic Reviews:
"Kitty Aldridge's language captures the casual brutality of childhood like a butterfly in a net." (Independent)
"[C]arefully observed, spirited portraits form much of the considerable charm of this powerful, slow-burning..." (Sunday Telegraph)
"Mercurial, deft, and wondrous in its sentences and uncanny descriptions. Grave, knowing, melancholy, often extremely funny and ultimately optimistic." (Richard Ford)
Members Reviews:
an intriguing examination of two lives generations apart
Sean is an 8-year-old boy living in a housing estate in England (what Americans would call a development) in the 1960s. Walter is a 17-year-old young man living with his mother in the same locale in the 1930s. Besides their similar homesites, they have in common loving two local girls desperately - but apparently unrequitedly. And neither of them is from anything approaching a well-heeled family.
With astounding delicacy and style, Kitty Aldridge mines the inner workings of both young people's brains, making their day-to-day lives come out on the printed page in ways that you might have not thought of - or thought of subconsciously. As an author, she gives each young person a chapter to themselves alternately, and the reader really feels that they are watching Sean and Walter as they go about their different concerns. Sean is learning to read, through a system I, thankfully, did not have to endure; a sort of precursor to learning how to read by the Tip-and-Mitten method (as I did, and as I assumed everybody did). His exploits at school - he loves a neighbour girl, Ann, but in the way of many small boys, he loves his teacher also - are balanced by his pastimes away from school, where he spends a lot of time by himself, being considered slightly geeky by his contemporaries. Most of his time away from school is spent trying to impress Ann.
Walter, on the other hand, has a bit of a rough row to hoe in other ways. His mother is denigrating and demanding; his one good friend is a bit of a religious fanatic (as well as being a bit off); and his one true love, Mary, is a somewhat wild and forthright girl who taunts him unmercifully. He has a good job at the local water plant, but he longs for something else, something elevating; he writes poetry, but only he thinks it has merit.
