About this ebook
A British radio station struggles through the London blitz, in a “wonderful” novel of World War II England (A.S. Byatt), by a veteran of the BBC.
The nation is listening. It’s 1940, and BBC radio is on the air. Dedicated to the cause, it’s going to do what it does best: keep the British upper lip stiff without resorting to lies. But nightly blackouts and the thunder of exploding enemy bombs are only part of the chaos faced by the staff.
There’s a battle for control between two program directors—one recklessly randy, the other efficient. Their comely assistant is suffering the pangs of unrequited love; an unwed mother is resisting the impending birth of her baby; and an exiled French general takes to the airwaves demanding Britain’s surrender. Then there’s the concert hall itself—a makeshift shelter for the displaced that quickly becomes a hotbed for quick trysts, bloody brawls, private wars between the sexes, political grandstanding, pointless deaths, and overriding fear, as the news unfolds just outside the building’s vulnerable walls.
Inspired by the Booker Prize–winning author’s own wartime experiences at the BBC, Human Voices is a novel at once “funny, touching, and authentic” (Sunday Times, London).
“Made me laugh out loud as I have hardly done since Cold Comfort Farm. It is extraordinary and immensely praiseworthy that a book with such an ultimately serious idea can be so brilliantly funny.” —Country Life
“A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.” —New Criterion
The nation is listening. It’s 1940, and BBC radio is on the air. Dedicated to the cause, it’s going to do what it does best: keep the British upper lip stiff without resorting to lies. But nightly blackouts and the thunder of exploding enemy bombs are only part of the chaos faced by the staff.
There’s a battle for control between two program directors—one recklessly randy, the other efficient. Their comely assistant is suffering the pangs of unrequited love; an unwed mother is resisting the impending birth of her baby; and an exiled French general takes to the airwaves demanding Britain’s surrender. Then there’s the concert hall itself—a makeshift shelter for the displaced that quickly becomes a hotbed for quick trysts, bloody brawls, private wars between the sexes, political grandstanding, pointless deaths, and overriding fear, as the news unfolds just outside the building’s vulnerable walls.
Inspired by the Booker Prize–winning author’s own wartime experiences at the BBC, Human Voices is a novel at once “funny, touching, and authentic” (Sunday Times, London).
“Made me laugh out loud as I have hardly done since Cold Comfort Farm. It is extraordinary and immensely praiseworthy that a book with such an ultimately serious idea can be so brilliantly funny.” —Country Life
“A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.” —New Criterion
About the author
PENELOPE FITZGERALD wrote many books small in size but enormous in popular and critical acclaim over the past two decades. Over 300,000 copies of her novels are in print, and profiles of her life appeared in both the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine. In 1979, her novel Offshore won Britain’s Booker Prize, and in 1998 she won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for The Blue Flower. Though Fitzgerald embarked on her literary career when she was in her 60s, her career was praised as “the best argument . . . for a publishing debut made late in life” (New York Times Book Review). She told the New York TimesMagazine, “In all that time, I could have written books and I didn’t. I think you can write at any time of your life.” Dinitia Smith, in her New York Times obituary of May 3, 2000, quoted Penelope Fitzgerald from 1998 as saying, “I have remained true to my deepest convictions, I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?”
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