Land of GhostsAudiobook

E L James

A flat in London, a man she calls her sort-of-uncle, and someone only she can see

The novel starts after the worst has already happened. Everything the narrator loved is gone in one moment, and the life that follows is not really a life: it is a room in London, in the flat of a man called Dylan whom she describes as her sort-of-uncle, and whose only point of connection with her is that he has lost people too. Nobody in this arrangement is cruel. It is simply that grief does not make anyone good company.

Then there is someone else in the house. A young man who is funny, maddening and unnervingly easy to talk to, who understands her in a way that no living person bothers to, and who, for reasons the book takes its time with, is visible only to her. E L James builds the whole story on that single impossibility rather than on a puzzle: not whether he is real, but what you do with the one conversation that helps when you know perfectly well it cannot last.

Audiobook review by Emma Lawson

☆☆☆☆☆

E L James leaves the playroom and writes about grief instead

Nobody opening this book is expecting restraint from the author of Fifty Shades, and that is the first surprise: this is a quiet novel. The premise is a bereavement, a temporary housing arrangement and a boy nobody else can see, and the tone is closer to a first-person account of mourning than to anything erotic. Kirkus called it a portrayal of grief that grips from the opening, which is publisher-friendly language, but having listened to it, I do not think it is wrong. Bethan Rose Young carries almost all of it, and she plays the numbness rather than the tears, which is the right call: the narrator is not performing her sadness for anyone.

The structure is simple and it works. Chapters are short, the flat and the streets around it do most of the scenery, and the arrival of the boy changes the rhythm of the prose before it changes anything in the plot. Ed McVey and Maxim Ays are used far more sparingly than the cast list suggests, and that restraint is deliberate: this is one person's account, and the other voices feel like interruptions, which is exactly what they are supposed to be.

The best thing about the novel is what it refuses to do. It does not turn the ghost into an explanation, it does not give the listener a rulebook about what he can and cannot touch, and it does not resolve the central question with a mechanism. If you want the fantasy to be built like a system, this will frustrate you. If you accept it as a way of talking about loss, it lands, and the last third is genuinely moving without becoming sentimental, which for this author is a real piece of work.

The weak point, and I say it as someone who enjoyed the book, is the middle. Once the premise is established there is a stretch of chapters where the narrator circles the same feeling, going out, coming back, talking to the boy, going out again, and the plot stops moving for close to two hours. In a novel about grief that circling is thematically justified, but on audio, with thirteen hours and fifty-four minutes of runtime, it is also where I caught myself checking how much was left. A tighter edit would not have hurt it.

There is also the question of what this book is being sold as. The marketing leans hard on the Fifty Shades connection, and listeners arriving for that will find a very different animal: the romance here is impossible rather than explicit, and the tension is elegiac rather than physical. I do not think that is a flaw in the book, it is a flaw in the promise, and it will account for a lot of disappointed reviews in the coming weeks.

As for value, thirteen hours and fifty-four minutes for a novel of this length is generous, and the production is clean: Penguin Audio, no music, no gimmicks, three voices doing exactly what three voices should. If you have lost someone and you are the sort of person who reads about it, this will find you. If you are here for the author's earlier reputation, adjust your expectations first. Either way, the site has her back catalogue to compare with, Fifty Shades of Grey and Fifty Shades Darker, and the distance between them is the most interesting thing about this release.

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Land of Ghosts is E L James writing something new: a first-person novel about a narrator who loses everyone she loves in a single moment, moves to London to live with a man she calls her sort-of-uncle, and then meets a young man nobody else can see. It is a love story built on an impossibility, closer to a book about grief than to the author's earlier work. Thirteen hours and fifty-four minutes, read by Bethan Rose Young, Ed McVey and Maxim Ays.

With the trial you spend it on whichever title you like, this one included, and you can cancel from your account in a couple of clicks. The title you take stays in your library even if you cancel, so nothing disappears at the end of the period. Playback speed, the sleep timer and picking up exactly where you stopped all work the way you would expect.

Thirteen hours is a good length for a book that wants to be listened to slowly, and the three-voice production is used with restraint, so you are not juggling six characters in the car. If you know the author only by reputation, go in expecting quiet rather than heat. If you like novels about mourning with one impossible element in them, this is the one to start with this month.

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