A Partisan's Daughter

Louis de Bernieres

Oct 2008 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Sian Thomas and Jeff Rawle

About this audiobook

From the acclaimed author of Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings comes an intimate new novel, a love story at once raw and sweetly funny, wry and heartbreakingly sad.
He’s Chris: bored, lonely, trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage. In his forties, he’s a stranger inside the youth culture of London in the late 1970s, a stranger to himself on the night he invites a hooker into his car.
She’s Roza: Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, the daughter of one of Tito’s partisans. She’s in her twenties but has already lived a life filled with danger, misadventure, romance, and tragedy. And although she’s not a hooker, when she’s propositioned by Chris, she gets into his car anyway.
Over the next months Roza tells Chris the stories of her past. She’s a fast-talking, wily Scheherazade, saving her own life by telling it to Chris. And he takes in her tales as if they were oxygen in an otherwise airless world. But is Roza telling the truth? Does Chris hear the stories through the filter of his own need? Does it even matter?
This deeply moving novel of their unlikely love–narrated both in the moment and in recollection, each of their voices deftly realized–is also a brilliantly subtle commentary on storytelling: its seductions and powers, and its ultimately unavoidable dangers.

About the author

Louis de Bernières is the author of, among other novels, The Dust That Falls From Dreams, A Partisan’s Daughter, Birds Without Wings, Corelli’s Mandolin, The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, and The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts. Selected by Granta as one of the 20 Best Young British Novelists in 1993, de Bernières lives in London.

Sian Thomas is a Welsh actress who trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in the UK. She starred as Lady Macbeth in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Macbeth in 2004, to rave reviews, and has appeared in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix as Amelia Bones.

Jeff Rawle is an English actor who has appeared in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Hollyoaks, and is best known for his portrayal of George on Drop the Dead Donkey.