Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting
The Rider by Tim Krabbé
  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

The Rider

$13.13

Narrator Mark Meadows

This audiobook uses AI narration.

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

Learn more
Length 4 hours 53 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

Bloomsbury presents The Rider by Tim Krabbé, read by Mark Meadows.

At the start of the 137-kilometre Tour de Mont Aigoual, Tim Krabbé glances up from his bike to assess the crowd of spectators. ‘Non-racers,’ he writes. ‘The emptiness of those lives shocks me.’ Immediate and gripping from the first page, we race with the author as he struggles up the hills and clings on during descents in the unforgiving French mountains.

Originally published in 1978, The Rider is a modern-day classic that is recognised as one of the best books ever written about the sport. Brilliantly conceived and best read at a break-neck pace, it is a loving, imaginative and passionate tribute to the art of cycle racing.

Tim Krabbé is a chess as well as a cycling enthusiast and one of Holland's leading writers. His many books include the noir novels THE VANISHING and THE CAVE. He lives in Amsterdam. Sam Garrett, a former wire-service correspondent, is the translator of THE CAVE, also by Tim Krabbé, THE GATES OF DAMASCUS by Lieve Joris and SILENT EXTRAS by Arnon Grunberg.

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

A beautiful, quiet piece of work: unusual, plausible, moving and poignant A classic. Like all the best sports writing, The Rider manages to convey the excitement, determination and skill of the competitors even to readers who have little or no knowledge of the sport He lays bare the athlete's peculiar mixture of arrogance and terror, viciousness and camaraderie, and the result is one of the more convincing love stories of recent memory The Rider is a beautiful brute, as hard and fast as a thin wheel in a concrete road Its 148 pages will flash by in a blur of reckless, high-speed pleasure The Rider perfectly captures the grim satisfaction and endorphin-thrill that comes from riding a bike faster than you did the time before. It's also a reminder of the pure pleasure of reading Expand reviews
Give audiobooks, support local bookstores! Start gifting