The Undertow

Jo Baker

May 2012 · Blackstone Audio Inc. · Narrated by Anna Bentinck

About this audiobook

This is the story of the Hasting family—their secrets, their loves and losses, dreams and heartbreaks—captured in a seamless series of individual moments that span the years between the first World War and the present. The novel opens in 1914 as William, a young factory worker, spends one last evening at home before his departure for the navy...His son Billy, grows into a champion cyclist and will ride into the D-Day landings on a military bicycle...His son in turn, Will, struggles with a debilitating handicap to become an Oxford professor in the 1960s...And finally, young Billie Hastings makes a life for herself as an artist in contemporary London. Just as the names echo down through the family, so too does the legacy of choices made, chances lost, and truths long buried.

About the author

JO BAKER was born in Lancashire and educated at Oxford University and Queen's University Belfast. She is the author of The Undertow, and of 3 earlier novels published in the United Kingdom: Offcomer, The Mermaid's Child and The Telling. She lives in Lancaster.

Actress and producer Anna Bentinck trained at the Arts Educational School and has made over eight hundred broadcasts for BBC radio. Animation voices include the series 64 Zoo Lane, and on TV she has played Mary Dickens in Charles Dickens and Mary Rutherford in the Marie Curie series. Her many audiobooks include Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman, A Little Death by Laura Wilson, and Queen Victoria by Evelyn Anthony.