Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowAn Education
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreWhen Lynn Barber was sixteen, a stranger in a maroon sports car pulled up beside her as she was on her way home from school and offered her a ride. It was the beginning of a long journey from innocence to a precocious experience—an affair with an older man that would change her life. Barber's seducer left her with a taste for luxury hotels, posh restaurants and trips abroad—expensive habits that she managed to support in later life as a successful London journalist whose barbed interviews both terrorized and fascinated her smart-set subjects.
A poignant, shockingly candid account of the stages in a literary life—from promiscuity at Oxford to a stint at Penthouse to a complex marriage that endured—An Education is a classic of English memoir.
Lynn Barber studied English at Oxford University. She began her career in journalism at Penthouse and has since worked for a number of major British newspapers and for Vanity Fair. She has won five British Press Awards and has published two volumes of her celebrated interviews, Mostly Men and Demon Barber.
Carolyn Seymour is a voice artist and audiobook narrator. She was born in England and grew up on a farm on the Isle of Wight. Her rather eccentric Russian Irish parents instilled in her a love of reading and a passion for the countryside. She has lived in Los Angeles for the last thirty years, where she putters about in her garden, grows vegetables, entertains her children and friends, and hikes with her three glorious but ancient dogs.
Reviews
“An Education confirms Barber as the kind of lovely, thoughtful and outspoken character you’d love to sit next to at a dinner party.”
“[Barber’s] a suburban girl who’s frightened that she’s going to get cut out of everything good that happens in the city. That, to me, is a big story in popular culture. It’s the story of pretty much every rock ’n’ roll band.”
“Candid, unsentimental and extremely funny. I read it in one glorious go, laughing and crying throughout.”
“Few pieces of journalism have been more riveting than the hatchet jobs Lynn Barber used to make of the profiles she wrote for the Independent On Sunday and the Observer. Waiting avidly for the next one, I used to marvel that anyone was fool enough to submit themselves to her merciless examination. And now she has written a book as riveting as the profiles.”
“Magnificent, searing, honest.”
“Effortlessly engaging prose.”
“Lynn Barber is known for her acerbic features and inteviews, and this memoir is no less candid, fun and down to earth…An Education reads like a gossip over coffee with an irreverent mother in law.”
“Grab the chance to read this entertaining memoir while it’s being republished alongside Nick Hornby’s film adaptation.”
“This pithy account highlights how the encounter coloured the rest of her [Barber’s] life…lightly written yet brutally honest.”
“Barber’s memoir is funny, bold, incisive, clever and interesting.”
“Barber’s voice is of course hugely confident—sometimes grumpy, often a bit snooty, very often funny and always extremely frank. Take this to the beach and be grateful for feminism.”
“An absolutely marvelous read. The only thing wrong with it is that it is too short.”
“This book shares all of Barber’s best journalistic traits: it’s thrillingly readable, very light on its feet and you’ll want to finish it in one sitting.”
“The most riveting memoir you will read this year, comic and tragic by turns. A small masterpiece.”
“An insightful, funny and moving personal tale.”
Expand reviews