Product Description

The childhood memoir of one of Britain's best-loved writers

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15336 in Books
• Published on: 2000-11-06
• Released on: 2000-11-06
• Format: Audiobook
• Binding: Audio CD

Yorkshire Evening Post, 11 August, 2007
'This delightful collection is full of the humour, warmth and poignancy that characterises his work... As with all of Bennett's work, Telling Tales is one of life's pleasures.'

Synopsis
This book features ten childhood snapshots from the master of the monologue such as: "A Strip Of Blue", "Proper Names", "Our War", "Eating Out", "An Ideal Home", "Aunt Eveline", "A Shy Butcher", "Unsaid Prayers", "Days Out", and, "No Mean City". Following on from the phenomenal success of "Writing Home", Alan Bennett reminisces about his early years - from his schooldays to undergraduate life at Oxford University. It was an ordinary childhood - growing up in Leeds taught Alan early on that 'life is generally something that happens elsewhere'. Yet the children who long for German bombs to lend their city some wartime glamour; the working class mother who reads "Ideal Home" and dreams of coffee mornings and cocktail parties; and 18-year-old Alan - a practising Anglican who is deeply distrustful of God, strike a chord within all of us. In fact, it is their very ordinariness that makes these tales so special - combined, of course, with the wry observation and tender understatement that have earned Alan Bennett his place at the forefront of contemporary writing.

About the Author
Alan Bennett is one of Britain's best-loved and most highly acclaimed writers. He has written widely for radio, television and theatre. His latest play, The History Boys, won several awards, including Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Awards for Best Play and the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play. It also won six Tony Awards, including Best Play, following an extremely successful transfer to Broadway. In 2006 Bennett was named Author of the Year at the British Book Awards for Untold Stories, his recent collection of memoirs and diaries.

Customer Reviews

A saving grace
I bought Alan Bennett's books on tape for my mother. She used to listen to them in bed at night, lying in the dark as Bennett's gentle, querulous voice described the minutiae of his family life in all its banal detail, illuminated by his wonderful observation and humour. Any one of his sentences will raise a smile. A whole book's-worth leaves you glowing with a feeling that all of our lives are equally full of this richness. How could they not be, when Bennett has found so much in what appears to be such a constrained and circumscribed world? He is indeed a national institution and we are fortunate that his voice on tape is perfectly equal to the poignancy and intimacy of his writing.

Alan Bennett - Telling Tales
In this most superbly written autobiography, Alan Bennett turns his well observed prose onto his own past and vividly recreates and relives his childhood and youth for us over 10 seperate chapters.
These 10 chapters are like snapshots - all are immensely readable and are full of Bennett's wry observations of working class life, the pecularities and foibles of his own family and his ever present awareness of the effect change has on a family holding itself together day-by-day with the spectre of World War II ever present in the book.

Bennett succeeds in bringing his wartime world to life as we enter a world of family picnics out on the moors and singing on a Sunday around the piano (with his enduring Aunt Eveline) Food - and in particular 'fancy' food gets the Bennett treatment, as his mother, Lilian, remarks on the growing popularity of new ingredients in salad "all the boundaries are coming down". A must for all Bennett fans and a good entry point for those who are new to his writing also.

A Total Delight
The mixture as before, warmth, charm, humour and a wonderful eye (and ear) for detail. Most people of the World War II generation will have similar memories, and for the younger listener these short tales bring to life, as does little else, what life was like more than half a century ago. The subject matter may be 'ordinary', but there is nothing ordinary in the way Bennett recounts it. He is one of the great joys of English literature and his inimical reading of his own texts is a source of constant delight.