The Usual Desire to Kill

Name: The Usual Desire to Kill
Brand: Simon & Schuster Audio
Availability: InStock
Author: Camilla Barnes
ISBN: 9781668111086

Author: Camilla Barnes

Narrator: Harriet Walter

Unabridged: 6 hr 11 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Published: 04/01/2025

Categories: Fiction, Family Life, Small Town & Rural

Synopsis

A “droll, psychologically astute…unexpected…very funny” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air) and moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of decades-old food.

Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”

This wry, propulsive story about an eccentric yet endearing family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.

About Camilla Barnes

Camilla Barnes was born and brought up in England but moved to France in her twenties. She lives in Paris and works in theatre, doing every job possible there except act. She writes for the stage in both English and French. The Usual Desire to Kill is her first novel.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on April 22, 2025

i know it well (review to come / thanks to the publisher for the copy)......more

Goodreads review by Christy on March 20, 2025

'Your parents are your parents, you don't question what you have for dinner, or where you live, or how they talk to you, that's just the way things are. It's when you're older that you start to think, hey, that was a bit odd, wasn't it'? Reading 'The Usual Desire to Kill' is like being plonked in a r......more

Goodreads review by Kate on April 14, 2025

4.5 I really enjoyed this book. It made me laugh and there's also a fair amount of sadness in it. It is perfectly balanced. The story is mainly told by the youngest daughter, Miranda, a stage actress but other narrators wander in and out in the form of letters from the unnamed mother to her sister, K......more

Goodreads review by Stephen Richard on April 02, 2025

The Usual Desire to Kill is a curious read - a mixture of melancholy and aging and comedic conversations that seem abstract to the outsider but make sense within families. This is the story of Miranda and Charlotte whose parents having left the world of academia in Oxford and moved to rural France no......more

Goodreads review by Brady on April 02, 2025

This is a book about an interesting little family. I’d recommend if you like fleabag and maybe the structure of Station Eleven......more

Quotes

"It’s possible that another performer could make this delicious audiobook more fun than Harriet Walter has, but hard to see how. “The usual desire to kill” is the emotion felt by two English sisters who are trying to cope with their aging and blithely infuriating parents who have moved themselves to a ramshackle stone house in rural France. Walter’s astringent delivery is deadpan funny and so skillfully judged that even the occasional llama in the kitchen seems plausible. Barnes, a playwright, gives their actor daughter a marvelously apt subplot involving King Lear, while at home their dotty mother lies about a needed hip replacement and their father tends chickens and pretends he can’t hear his wife. It’s mad fun, but also far more than skin deep."