Comfort and Joy
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Comfort and Joy
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Narrated by:
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Lucy Brown
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By:
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India Knight
About this listen
The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of India Knight's darkly comic Comfort and Joy. Read with humour and sensitivity by Lucy Brown, the star of the hit show Primeval.
It's December 23rd and Clara Dunphy is running around Oxford Street like a blue-arsed fly trying to buy presents. She wants to make Christmas perfect: it's a lifelong ambition. And a challenging one at the best of times, even without taking her sixteen guests - sorry, "loved ones" - and their varying degrees of social dysfunction into account. Meanwhile, something weird has happened to her marriage, and the ho, ho, ho is thin on the ground.
Why does Christmas have such an emotional hold over us? Why does family stuff hit the peak of its madness on December the 25th? And is it okay to want more than you have, when what you have seems so enviable from the outside?
A blackly funny, tender dissection of the meaning of love - family love, sibling love, children love - Comfort and Joy will make you laugh and cry.
©2010 India Knight (P)2011 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
Critic reviews
What listeners say about Comfort and Joy
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Simon Bayliss
- 08-12-23
Painfully smug
Performance helps, but the story is so smugly virtue signalling it makes for a grating listen.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Whirliwig
- 23-05-24
Annoying characters with first world problems
Maybe it’s the timing: reading this whilst the UK is still in the grips of the post covid financial turmoil but really I stopped feeling sympathetic towards the protagonist and her family / love dilemmas as soon as she started splashing wads of cash about on vulgar china cats and bespoke bottles of Chanel scent that weren’t even enjoyed by the recipients. The sisters and mother are even more irritating : snobbish posho’s who amble about in a state of upper class twattery meant to be charming but toe curlingly irritating.
‘The Truffle’!! Urrrgh!!!
I got as far as the third Christmas spent in a villa in Morroco, where mother Hut loudly condemns the great unwashed in airports, when I lost the will to subject myself to any more. I think we are meant to feel affection and humour towards these idiots. If you want a more acerbic dissection of the upper middle class; Julian Fellows did it better in Snobs.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Denise McLaughlin
- 28-10-15
Why all the bad language?
The story is good, but I feel it is not enhanced by such frequent use of swear words. I am far from being a prude and I think the younger generation feel they invented these words - wrong! Use of profanity is ok if it enhances the story, but over use detracts from it and some are used to shock.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Kaz
- 11-02-22
Comfortable and joyous
It’s a little pretentious but it’s funny and heart warming. A happy read and Christmassy.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- simon
- 05-01-22
annoying
there are some genuinely funny moments, and a couple of good anthropological observations, but the characters and narrator are so smug that i struggled through this book
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- London Girl
- 15-04-15
Enjoyable story, excellently read!
Really enjoyed this- and it wasn't even Christmas! Very well read including most of the accents, and good fun to listen to.
Maybe more of a girls story, but not chick lit. Worth the listen!
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1 person found this helpful