The latest novel from the Reasons to Stay Alive author Matt Haig begins with an octogenarian man having a heart attack. Former business magnate Wilbur Budd is already feeling a bit peculiar when he receives a phone call from his ex-wife, Maggie, who he hasn't heard from in years. “I wanted to hear your voice,” she tells him wistfully. Minutes after getting off the phone, Wilbur collapses on his front lawn and dies.
What sounds like the end of a story is, in fact, the beginning as Wilbur finds himself standing on a train platform with his mind “reverberating as if from some giant cosmic cymbal crash”. A train arrives and a woman disembarks and introduces herself as Agnes. She is, she says, the ghost of a bookseller who once ran a shop Wilbur visited as a child. She will be guiding him in a voyage through his past, pausing at formative moments including his brother's premature death and Wilbur and Maggie's honeymoon in Venice. “This is death,” Agnes tells him. “Where your life flashes before your eyes. This is how it happens. Fast and slow. Like life …”
A cosy feelgood tale with shades of Dickens
With shades of Dickens's A Christmas Carol, The Midnight Train is a cosy feelgood tale, despite the ostensibly bleak themes of death and the afterlife. The narrator is the Happy Valley and McMafia actor James Norton who brings a rare softness and gentle longing to his performance. As Wilbur reflects on times gone by, he comes to realise the things in life he could have done better. Available via Canongate, 8hr 36min.
Further listening
You With the Sad Eyes by Christina Applegate, Headline, 8hr 27min. A candid memoir in which the actor best known as Kelly Bundy from Married … With Children reflects on her childhood raised by a heroin-addicted mother, becoming the family breadwinner as a child actor, and her recent diagnosis with multiple sclerosis. Read by the author.
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Audible Studios, 12hr 47min. Saskia Maarleveld reads this smartly plotted eco-thriller from the Booker prize-winning author of The Luminaries. It tells of a guerrilla gardening collective in New Zealand, named after the moving forest in Macbeth, who set their sights on a plot of land owned by an American billionaire.
