This season's most talked-about new movies, Blindness and Slumdog Millionaire (based on the novel Q&A) top the 2008 movie tie-in releases by BBC Audio, an imprint of BBC Audiobooks America.
An inspired performance by narrator Kerry Shale captures the spirit of this offbeat novel, a blend of high comedy and touching melancholy that begins in a small prison cell in India where a penniless 18-year-old waiter is under arrest after winning on the game show Who Will Win a Billion? The show's directors bribe the police to arrest him, accusing the waiter of cheating. The unlucky winner is rescued by a lawyer who draws out the story of his life, as well as the source of his knowledge.
Q&A is the inspiration for the new film Slumdog Millionaire, directed by Trainspotting's Danny Boyle, which won the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival's People's Choice Award and has been named by Roger Ebert as a strong contender at the Academy Awards. It is set to close the London Film Festival on October 30 before its wide release.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Vikas Swarup is an Indian diplomat who has served in Turkey, the United States, and Great Britain, and currently works in New Delhi. Q&A is his first novel.
ABRIDGED — ON SALE NOW
5 CDs — 978-1-57270-487-9 — $27.95
Digital Download — 978-1-57270-716-0 — $19.95
A controversial, brilliant fable of sudden terror and redemption, Blindness is the international bestseller that won the author the Nobel Prize in Literature. An unnamed, typical city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women.
A magnificent parable of loss and disorientation and a vivid evocation of the horrors of the twentieth century, Blindness has swept the reading public with its powerful portrayal of man's worst appetites and weaknesses—and man's ultimately exhilarating spirit.
AUTHOR INFORMATION
José Saramago was born in Portugal in 1922. His novels have been published in dozens of languages around the world. In 1998, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
UNABRIDGED — ON SALE NOW
11 CDs — 978-1-60283-444-6 — $29.95
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