Skip content
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
This Land by Owen Jones
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account
Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

This Land

The Struggle for the Left

$14.72

Narrator Owen Jones

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more
Length 13 hours 19 minutes
Language English
  Send as gift   Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

      Log in       Create account

Brought to you by Penguin.

The No.1 bestselling author of Chavs and The Establishment returns with an urgent, revelatory account of where the Left - and Britain - goes next

On 12th December 2019, the Left died. That at least was the view of much of Britain's media and political establishment, who saw the electoral defeat of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party as the damning repudiation of everything it stood for.

Yet, just over four years previously, the election of Corbyn as Labour leader seemed like a sea-change in politics: reanimating not just a party in apparently terminal decline but a country adrift, with a transformative vision based on a more just, more equal society and economy.

In this revelatory new book, Owen Jones explores how these ideas took hold, how they promised to change the nature of British politics - and how everything then went profoundly, catastrophically wrong. Why did the Left fail so badly? Where, in this most critical of times, does that failure leave its values and ideas? Where does it leave Britain itself?

© Owen Jones 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Owen Jones was born in Sheffield, grew up in Stockport and studied history at Oxford. His first book, the international bestseller Chavs, was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and chosen as one of The New York Times top 10 non-fiction books of 2011. In 2013 he won Young Writer of the Year at the Political Book Awards. His second book was the bestselling The Establishment: and How They Get Away With It, an exposé of Britain's powerful elites. He is a columnist for the Guardian and a frequent broadcaster.

Owen Jones was born in Sheffield, grew up in Stockport and studied history at Oxford. His first book, the international bestseller Chavs, was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award and chosen as one of The New York Times top 10 non-fiction books of 2011. In 2013 he won Young Writer of the Year at the Political Book Awards. His second book was the bestselling The Establishment: and How They Get Away With It, an exposé of Britain's powerful elites. He is a columnist for the Guardian and a frequent broadcaster.

Illustration of person sitting

Shop small, give big!

With credit bundles, you choose the number of credits and your recipient picks their audiobooks—all in support of local bookstores.

Start gifting
Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

Now’s a great time to shop indie. When you start a new one credit per month membership supporting local bookstores with promo code SWITCH, we’ll give you two bonus audiobook credits at sign-up.

Sign up today

Reviews

Owen Jones has managed to produce a whodunnit political page-turner and a surprisingly fair account (given that Jones was a player in the Corbyn project) of both an inspiring and tortuous period of Labour history. An absorbing, nuanced account of the making of electoral disaster. Very, very powerful ... you will not come away from reading This Land without your understanding of what happened to the Labour Party over the last five years massively enhanced. For Owen Jones, the drama of these years is almost Shakespearean... Where Jones is strongest, and impressively so, is when he turns his analytical gaze on his own side. His dissection of the anti-Semitism issue is heartfelt and intelligent. His account of the infighting and weakness of the leader's team rings true... He correctly observes that Brexit left Labour on a hook. Jones has [a hard] task: to assess the failure of a project he championed, in which he was a significant player, and which depended on the work and was damaged by the flaws of people he is close to. It is a far more honest account of those difficulties than is ever given by journalists of the political centre, or the right ... Jones has made a serious attempt to understand the left's weaknesses as something other than the fault of the party's right ... Jones is making a brutal assessment, of the sort too often lacking in the past few years, of what is possible. Owen Jones is a phenomenon of our time The best political book I have read for a long while, all the better for Jones's unashamed participant observation. Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting