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  • Published: 9 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9781473563797
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 11 hr 33 min
  • Narrators: Richard E. Grant, Richard Cordery, Nina Sosanya, Laurence Kennedy

A Ladder to the Sky




A psychological drama of cat and mouse, A Ladder to the Sky shows how easy it is to achieve the world if you are prepared to sacrifice your soul.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne, read by Richard E. Grant, Richard Cordery, Nina Sosanya and Laurence Kennedy.

A psychological drama of cat and mouse, A Ladder to the Sky shows how easy it is to achieve the world if you are prepared to sacrifice your soul.

If you look hard enough, you can find stories pretty much anywhere. They don’t even have to be your own. Or so would-be writer Maurice Swift decides very early on in his career.

A chance encounter in a Berlin hotel with celebrated novelist Erich Ackermann gives him an opportunity to ingratiate himself with someone more powerful than him. For Erich is lonely, and he has a story to tell. Whether or not he should do so is another matter entirely.

Once Maurice has made his name, he sets off in pursuit of other people’s stories. He doesn’t care where he finds them – or to whom they belong – as long as they help him rise to the top.

Stories will make him famous but they will also make him beg, borrow and steal. They may even make him do worse.

  • Published: 9 August 2018
  • ISBN: 9781473563797
  • Imprint: Transworld Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 11 hr 33 min
  • Narrators: Richard E. Grant, Richard Cordery, Nina Sosanya, Laurence Kennedy

About the author

John Boyne

John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, six for younger readers and a collection of short stories. Perhaps best known for his 2006 multi-award-winning book The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, John’s other novels, notably The Absolutist and A History of Loneliness, have been widely praised and are international bestsellers. Most recently, The Heart's Invisible Furies was a Richard & Judy Bookclub word-of-mouth bestseller, and A Ladder to the Sky was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award in association with Listowel Writers’ Week.

His novels are published in over fifty languages.

Also by John Boyne

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Praise for A Ladder to the Sky

A deliciously dark tale of ambition, seduction and literary theft . . . compelling and terrifying, powerful and intensely unsettling. In Maurice Swift, Boyne has given us an unforgettable protagonist, dangerous and irresistible in equal measure. The result is an ingeniously conceived novel that confirms Boyne as one of the most assured writers of his generation.

Hannah Beckerman, Observer

Maurice Swift, the novelist protagonist of John Boyne’s A Ladder to the Sky, is a bookish version of Patricia Highsmith’s psychopathic antihero Tom Ripley.

The Times

A dark morality tale in the mould of Patricia Highsmith . . . consistently intriguing

Daily Mail

Everything the wonderful Irish novelist John Boyne writes is special . . . a highly entertaining read

Jake Kerridge, S Magazine, Sunday Express

Gripping . . . John Boyne is a master storyteller and fans will doubtless be captivated by this chilling and darkly comic tale of unrelenting ambition

Daily Express

Boyne delivers a perfect balance of pace and detail to keep you gripped throughout

i Newspaper

Maurice Swift is a literary Tom Ripley . . . a first-class page turner

Guardian

It charts the rise of Maurice Swift, as cold and manipulative a character as you’re likely to meet this year . . . the story takes an ever darkening series of twists and turns

Express

‘A Ladder to the Sky is endlessness inventive and wickedly funny. Boyne’s irredeemable antihero holds up a brutally well lit mirror to every writer who has ever wondered what they need to do to do that little better...’

Patrick Gale, Author of A Place Called Winter

Beware reading this in public: Boyne’s prose inspires such a collision of laughing and wincing that you’re likely to seem a little unbalanced

Washington Post

Maliciously witty, erudite and ingeniously constructed

NPR

Clever, chilling and beautifully paced, a study of inner corrosion that Patricia Highsmith could not have done better

The Times