A Partisans Daughter, Louis de Bernieres
A Partisans Daughter, Louis de Bernieres
List: $15.00 | Sale: $10.50
Club: $7.50

A Partisan's Daughter

Author: Louis de Bernieres

Narrator: Sian Thomas, Jeff Rawle

Unabridged: 5 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/07/2008


Synopsis

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 DreamsA 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kevin on March 05, 2025

Chris, the narrator of this story, is a forty-year-old Englishman trapped in a loveless marriage to an insipid wife whose veins run on skimmed milk. Bedevilled by frustration and desperate for some knee-trembling rumpy-pumpy, he sets out in his shit-brown Austin Allegro one night with the sole intent......more

Goodreads review by William on September 14, 2008

Nobody does love and loss like De Bernieres. This is Scheherezade retold but in it, everyone is trying to save themselves in different ways. It's also about the power of storytelling itself. It starts a bit slowly and initially the characters are not entirely sympathetic, but as the veils come off......more

Goodreads review by John on May 29, 2012

Louis de Bernieres, in his novel A Partisan's Daughter, answers a common question. Why do men lay down five dollars cover to enter a dim lit strip club to watch women they probably couldn't take home to mom, take off their bikini tops and gyrate out of arm's reach for ten to fifteen minutes? Then pa......more

Goodreads review by Dale on December 19, 2008

A Partisan's Daughter is the latest novel by Louis de Bernieres, the first since Birds Without Wings. It is a very small novel, almost a novella. Set in the late 70s and early 80s, it is the story of a young Serbian woman, Roza, who is living illegally in Britain and Chris, a middle-aged traveling s......more

Goodreads review by Jayne on October 17, 2012

This isn’t so much a story as the recalling of someone telling a story – all very arm’s length. For this reason I found it hard to get into, and I was constantly reminded that as much as anything else it was a way of proving that Louis de Bernieres’ encyclopaedic knowledge of international history a......more


Quotes

“A wise and moving novel, perfectly accomplished. It shines fresh light on the nature of love . . . Like Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, A Partisan’s Daughter is a novel about missed opportunities and wrong paths taken, tracing the way in which one false move can alter the history of a life . . . A glory.”
The Guardian

“How do you follow up Corelli’s Mandolin, one of the most successful British novels of all time? . . . A Partisan’s Daughter, although also revolving around politics, history and romance, is very much a departure. Yet it is a triumph–a finely-executed little masterpiece.”
The Mirror

“Although Scheherazade may be the most famous damsel ever to delay her fate by spinning out nightly yarns of fantasy and intrigue, Roza, de Bernières’s captivating temptress, is equally gifted in the art of storytelling . . . A provocative and artful analyst of the human psyche, de Bernières vividly celebrates the tantalizing strength of stories to transform individual lives through their eternal and universal appeal.”
Booklist (starred)

“Gripping . . . De Bernières’s mellifluent, clear prose slips through the reader’s mind with efficient ease, and even at its most dramatically jarring, you never need to come up for air. This is de Bernières’s skill, and it is a considerable one.”
The Times

“Vintage de Bernières . . . The author, like Roza, knows how to construct a captivating narrative, and A Partisan’s Daughter is a graceful, persuasive exploration of boundless storytelling and the limits of love.”
BookPage

“An attractive and completely compelling story about the power of narrative.”
Daily Mail

“In A Partisan’s Daughter, his urgent, spare new novel of romantic obsession, Louis de Bernières, proficient at intricate historical narratives, shows himself an artist of the simpler story as well. Not that simple means easy. If prostitution, as so often is said, is the oldest profession, then writing about fallen women must be the oldest literary subject. To make that subject hit its mark requires a new spin. For de Bernières, it’s the smoldering repression suffered by a melancholy London salesman.”
New York Times Book Review

“De Bernières is a skilful writer, poetic but unforced, who can soothe you like a masseur, telling well-oiled stories of past excitements, and then just when you are drifting off, dexterously tweak a pressure point.”
Daily Telegraph