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The Sunshine Cruise Company by John Niven
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The Sunshine Cruise Company

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Narrator Maggie Ollerenshaw

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Length 9 hours 51 minutes
Language English
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Susan Frobisher and Julie Wickham are turning sixty. They live in a small Dorset town and have been friends since school. On the surface Susan has it all โ€“ a lovely house and a long marriage to accountant Barry. Life has not been so kind to Julie, but now, with several failed businesses and bad relationships behind her, she has found stability: living in a council flat and working in an old peopleโ€™s home.

Then Susanโ€™s world is ripped apart when Barry is found dead in a secret flat โ€“ or rather, a sex dungeon. It turns out Barry has been leading a double life as a swinger. Heโ€™s run up a fortune in debts and now the bank is going to take Susanโ€™s home.

Until, under the influence of an octogenarian gangster named Nails, the women decide that, rather than let the bank take everything Susan has, theyโ€™re going to take the bank. With the help of Nails and the thrill-crazy, wheelchair-bound Ethel they pull off the daring robbery, but soon find that getting away with it is not so easy.

The Sunshine Cruise Company is a sharp satire on friendship, ageing, the English middle classes and the housing bubble from one of Britain's sharpest and funniest writers.

John Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. He is the author of ten novels and has written for a wide range of publications, including a weekly column for the Scottish Sunday Mail. He lives in Buckinghamshire.

Audiobook details

Author:

Narrator:
Maggie Ollerenshaw

ISBN:
9781473516991

Length:
9 hours 51 minutes

Language:
English

Publisher:
Random House

Publication date:

Edition:
Unabridged

Libro.fm rank:
#15,988 Overall

Genre rank:
#1,050 in Humor

Illustration of person opening a gift

The perfect last-minute gift

Audiobook credit bundles can be delivered instantly, given worldwide, and support local bookstores!

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Phone showing make the switch message

Limited-time offer

Get two free audiobooks!

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Reviews

[I was] hooked by this tale of rampaging women growing old disgracefullyโ€ฆAn enjoyable romp spiced up by the authorโ€™s sharp and perceptive eye. Featuring the greatest female duo since Thelma and Louise, John Nivenโ€™s novel is a total gem. This is a bawdy, gaudy, rock โ€˜nโ€™ roll spree of a book. The first chapter reads like a Radio 4 afternoon play, but weโ€™re soon off and running (or should I say lurching?), burping, boozing, cursing and carousing our way through the high jinks. Itโ€™s as filthy as a weekend in Clacton-on-Sea, with the requisite pain and loss hidden just beneath the bedsheets. A rollicking road caperโ€ฆhugely enjoyable. A broad tongue-in-cheek comedy that rattles along. A hearty bloodstained handshake, then, for John Nivenโ€™s The Sunshine Cruise Company, in which a group of women aged from their mid-teens to advanced eighties get to behave in a thoroughly disreputable fashionโ€ฆThis new novel, Nivenโ€™s seventh, breaks with his usual habit of laying bare the male psyche, but retains his celebrated strengths: sparky, unfussy writing; a fast-moving plot; and, most notably, an ability to be thoroughly outspoken about matters sexual and scatological whilst retaining a surprising degree of empathy for the human trials of his charactersโ€ฆComic fiction that reduces all its personnel to mere caricatures can be a trial to read, but this book, for all the amped-up extremity of the events it portrays, works because its characters get a grounding in emotional reality as well as a bunch of outrageous events with which to contendโ€ฆEngaging, utterly accessible and boundary-bending: middle-aged chick lit that follows none of the conventions of middle-aged chick lit; lad lit that features no lads. In other words, itโ€™s for pretty much anyone, provided they can stomach Ethelโ€™s vocabulary and the unsavoury details of Barryโ€™s exit from lifeโ€ฆIt would be a major thrill to see a story like this in movie form. Might the ladies of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel be persuaded to consider a slightly racier residenceโ€ฆ? The fun is considerableโ€ฆa caperโ€ฆit may well be the funniest thing youโ€™ll read this year. John Niven manages the trick of being both profane and humane. Fast-moving, acerbic, occasionally tasteless but never dull, this will delight anyone who thinks old people get a raw dealโ€ฆA great comic romp with deft touches. The wild man of literatureโ€ฆ [The Sunshine Cruise Company is] Fast and furious and, characteristically, brutal in places. Expand reviews
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