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Dominion of Blades (Dominion of Blades, Book 1), by Matt Dinniman | Audiobook
8 March 2026
Audiobook details
She decided the world had to hear her
In September 2024, a trial in Avignon, France, held the attention of millions. Gisele Pelicot had chosen to waive her right to anonymity and face, in open court, her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot and the fifty men accused of sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious. She had been drugged and abused in her own home for nearly a decade without knowing it. Her declaration that shame had to change sides became a rallying cry heard across the world.
In this memoir, Gisele reconstructs what happened, not from a position of victimhood, but as the sole witness to her own life. She goes back to 2020, when a phone call from a local police station set everything in motion, and traces the investigation, the trial, and the years of quiet suffering that preceded both. She revisits the fifty years of a marriage she believed in, and the slow process of understanding what had been done to her.
What makes this audiobook unusual is its emotional restraint. Gisele does not perform grief or demand sympathy. She states what happened, what she felt, and what she chose to do with it. Narrated by Emma Thompson, the recording gives the text a weight and clarity that makes the listening experience genuinely hard to shake.
I listened to this in two sittings and I am still thinking about it a week later. I knew who Gisele Pelicot was before I pressed play. I had followed the Avignon trial in the autumn of 2024, the images of her walking past crowds of supporters, her composure at the microphone. I thought I already understood, at least partially, what this book would contain.
I was wrong. The trial was the surface. A Hymn to Life goes underneath it. Gisele begins in 2020, the year a police officer called her out of nowhere to tell her that her husband had been filmed in a supermarket car park attempting to photograph a woman under her skirt. That call was the first crack in a life she had built over fifty years, a life she had no reason to doubt. The book traces what followed: the discovery that Dominique Pelicot had been secretly drugging her and inviting strangers into their home for close to a decade, the investigation, and eventually the trial in which she chose to waive her right to anonymity. That decision, she explains, was not impulsive. It was deliberate. She wanted the men in that courtroom to be named.
What I did not expect was how much of the book is about ordinary life. Her childhood, the death of her mother when she was nine, a marriage that for most of its length she describes as loving, her children and grandchildren. The abuse does not sit in a vacuum. It sits inside a real life, which is what makes it so hard to read around. There is a passage where she describes waking up repeatedly soaked and confused, going to doctors, fearing she had early dementia, while her husband accompanied her to every appointment. He had been drugging her. He knew what the symptoms were because he was causing them.
She does not editorialize. She does not ask you to understand how she felt. She describes events with a precision that is, frankly, more effective than any emotional reconstruction would be. The book is co-written with journalist Judith Perrignon and translated by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver, and the prose reads as though it belongs to Gisele alone.
On the narration: Emma Thompson reads this in a way that feels like the only possible approach. She does not dramatize. She does not soften. At 7 hours and 23 minutes, there is not a single moment where the performance intrudes on the text. Thompson's voice carries a particular quality on the chapters dealing with the trial, a steadiness that mirrors Gisele's own, and on the final pages, something opens up that I found genuinely moving. This is the audiobook format working exactly as it should.
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A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisele Pelicot is a memoir that begins with a phone call and ends with a verdict. In September 2024, after Dominique Pelicot and fifty other men were found guilty of rape or aggravated sexual assault, Gisele had already done something no one had expected of her: she had opened the trial to the public, refused anonymity, and stood in court to say that shame belonged to the perpetrators. The book traces how she arrived at that decision, moving back through fifty years of marriage, a decade of abuse she had no knowledge of, and the legal process that finally named what had been done to her.
The free trial, cancellable at any time, gives you immediate access to the audiobook narrated by Emma Thompson across 7 hours and 23 minutes. Thompson reads without dramatization, letting the words carry their own weight, which is the right choice for a text this precise.
The audiobook stays yours permanently even after the trial ends. The free trial also opens access to thousands of other titles, with no commitment required. Start listening now.
US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
