Sometimes, as a writer, the ways in which readers discover your book will surprise you. Some books do well with book clubs, or with libraries, or with a certain demographic who weren't expected to like them. Or else they become bestsellers in countries where no one had thought they would (my first young adult book was apparently a hit in Estonia, for instance). This has also been the case with The House at the Edge of Night. It turns out that audio books are having a surge in interest at the moment, and The House at the Edge of Night is proving popular with listeners. This is thanks in major part to the narrator, Edoardo Ballerini, whose recording is so good that I ended up listening to the whole 24 hours of it despite having read it at least a couple of times already. But it's still been exciting, and unexpected, to discover that a large number of The House at the Edge of Night's readers are actually listeners.
This makes me happy partly because of how fitting it is. A book like The House at the Edge of Night, which draws inspiration from a tradition of oral storytelling as diverse as Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and some man at the local bar, is meant to be 'heard' or 'listened to', even if the only voice narrating is the one in the reader's head. And it has also got me thinking about what it means to 'read' a book. In a world where books are constantly lamented as being at risk of extinction, I find it oddly comforting to think that someone could be accessing The House at the Edge of Night through a bookshop or free at a library; through printed pages, on an e-reader, a computer or a smartphone; in US English, British English, Russian, Czech, Danish or translated back into Italian - and, now, also, on a CD, read aloud. Which, in a way, is the oldest way of reading a story of them all.
Last month I was invited to do an interview for a magazine called AudioFile about the audio book. It brought up some interesting things: the oral storytelling tradition, what makes a good narrator for a cross-cultural novel which draws on more than one language, and my own long-standing love of audio books (which mostly has to do with being a teacher, a two-hour commute and insomnia, but is no less heartfelt for all that!). If you want to read more about how a reader can also be a listener, and how the audio book version of The House at the Edge of Night got made, the full AudioFile interview is here. And I also wrote an essay for the Books on Tape blog over the summer, which you can read here.
That's all for now, but thanks, audio book listeners, for surprising me over the last few months by embracing the book!
This makes me happy partly because of how fitting it is. A book like The House at the Edge of Night, which draws inspiration from a tradition of oral storytelling as diverse as Dickens, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and some man at the local bar, is meant to be 'heard' or 'listened to', even if the only voice narrating is the one in the reader's head. And it has also got me thinking about what it means to 'read' a book. In a world where books are constantly lamented as being at risk of extinction, I find it oddly comforting to think that someone could be accessing The House at the Edge of Night through a bookshop or free at a library; through printed pages, on an e-reader, a computer or a smartphone; in US English, British English, Russian, Czech, Danish or translated back into Italian - and, now, also, on a CD, read aloud. Which, in a way, is the oldest way of reading a story of them all.
Last month I was invited to do an interview for a magazine called AudioFile about the audio book. It brought up some interesting things: the oral storytelling tradition, what makes a good narrator for a cross-cultural novel which draws on more than one language, and my own long-standing love of audio books (which mostly has to do with being a teacher, a two-hour commute and insomnia, but is no less heartfelt for all that!). If you want to read more about how a reader can also be a listener, and how the audio book version of The House at the Edge of Night got made, the full AudioFile interview is here. And I also wrote an essay for the Books on Tape blog over the summer, which you can read here.
That's all for now, but thanks, audio book listeners, for surprising me over the last few months by embracing the book!
The House at the Edge of Night in AudioFile magazine at a US airport. I am relying on readers to send me these photos since I don't actually live anywhere the book is on sale, so it's reassuring to know from time to time that it still exists!
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