All She Wants for Christmas, by Lisa Jewell | Free Audiobook
All She Wants for ChristmasAudiobook
A wife with the money, a husband with a grudge, and a third woman who has been waiting
Kate has been patient in a way that ought to worry everyone. She did not arrive in the Stones' life all at once; she came in through December, one Christmas at a time, until she was part of the furniture and nobody could say precisely when that happened.
Louise Stone is the reason the house is comfortable: her novels sell, the money is hers, and her husband Fiddy has been left with the smaller half of everything. What he has instead is Kate, who listens. Then Louise falls ill with no explanation, a manuscript nobody can account for turns up at her publisher, and the marriage turns into several versions of the same story that cannot all be true.
This is an Audible Original rather than a novel with a narrator bolted on, and it shows from the first minute: there is sound design, there is music, and the cast plays scenes instead of reading them.
Ruth Wilson and Matthew Rhys carry the married couple, and the good decision here is that neither of them is written as the villain of the piece. Louise is vain and careless with the people who cook her dinner; Fiddy is resentful in the way of a man who has been polite about it for years. Phoebe Dynevor does the hardest job, because Kate has to be sympathetic and slightly wrong at the same time, and she plays her as someone who has thought about this for a long time.
Harriet Walter gets the smaller part and takes it anyway, which is the kind of thing that makes a four-hour production feel bigger than its length. The sound design is used for atmosphere rather than filler, and the original music never announces itself.
One practical detail: the title is exclusive to Audible, so it is only available there, and it has only a couple of ratings so far, so the star rating is not much of a guide yet.
If you like the domestic kind of suspense, It Could Have Been Her is Lisa Jewell in the same register, and Big Little Lies does the wealthy-marriage autopsy on a larger scale. This one is the shortest and the most theatrical of the three.
The illness is the hinge of the whole thing and it arrives when the listener has been made comfortable, which is where Jewell is at her best: she does not build dread, she lets ordinary domestic detail curdle. By the time the manuscript turns up at the publisher, you have already started suspecting the wrong person.
All She Wants for Christmas is Lisa Jewell's Audible Original: Louise Stone has the bestselling career, Fiddy has the resentment and Kate, and Kate has been weaving herself into their lives one Christmas at a time. Four hours and thirty-three minutes, performed by Ruth Wilson, Matthew Rhys, Phoebe Dynevor and Harriet Walter.
The free trial is the sensible way to approach an audio original, because it is the production as much as the story that you are deciding about: you open the title, listen to the first hour, and you know whether the format suits you. If it does, you keep listening and the audiobook stays in your library. If it does not, you cancel in a couple of clicks and that is the end of it.
There is a guide available on how the cancellation works. And if you decide not to continue, the audiobook remains yours either way. Before that, give the first December a chance: four hours, and a family that is being studied from the inside.
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US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
