Maureen Corrigan
speaker
1,260 appearances
41 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 16 Sep
Maureen Corrigan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 27 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Corrigan has a review.
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The fall publishing season is, as always, filled with such heavyweights that it seems like a backhanded compliment to say that the big takeaway about Kate Atkinson's new novel, Our Noble Selves, is that it's so much fun to read.
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Atkinson is known for her jittery historical novels that jump around in time, as well as for her Jackson Brody detective series.
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Our Noble Selves cleverly melds both forms for a purpose.
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It's an escapist novel that chronicles the need for escape in post-World War II Britain.
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The centerpiece of our noble selves, around which all the action and characters spin, is a real-life event, the Festival of Britain that took place in 1951.
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Intended to elevate the British people's spirits after the devastation of World War II, the chief festival site was located on the south bank of the Thames in London.
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Exhibits highlighted British arts, architecture, industry, history.
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It also included, as these boosterish exhibitions tend to do, a lot of random stuff.
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Beauty pageants and cookery demonstrations in which exotic foods like spaghetti and hot dogs were introduced to the British public.
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In an author's note, Atkinson says that she came across so much material that was strange and quirky that sometimes the things I was making up seemed quite dull in comparison.
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Among the actual oddities displayed at the festival were a collapsible rubber bus and a festival emblem composed of 604 gallstones and all from one patient.
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Our main character is a former reporter named Harry Flynn, who had the bad luck to be sent to Singapore in 1941, shortly before it fell to the Japanese.
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Harry became a POW, working on the so-called Burma Railway, a bridge over the River Kwai fame.
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Over 100,000 Asian civilian workers and allied POWs would die building this railway before the war's end.
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Returning in 1945 to London, Harry makes a rash marriage to a Zoftig war widow he meets in a pub one night.
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It was not just the siren call of sex that drew him to her, Harry recalls.
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She came complete with a ready life—house, child, dog, lawn—and he had reckoned it would be easy to slip into that life without too much effort on his part.
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Harry slips just as easily out of that misbegotten marriage and falls into a job assembling a poetry anthology for the Festival of Britain, drawn from dreadful doggerel submitted by the British public, another real-life detail that Atkinson has wicked fun describing here.
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But Harry's life, already haunted by what we would call PTSD, takes an ominous turn when a female co-worker he's had drinks with disappears, and he's set up to be the chief suspect.
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