Caro Claire Burke Audiobooks

Yesteryear: a tradwife influencer wakes in 1855, and the satire bites

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

82,401 listener ratings

Who is Caro Claire Burke?

Few debuts announce themselves as confidently as Yesteryear. Its premise, a tradwife content creator who goes to sleep in the present and wakes into what appears to be 1855, is the sort of idea that could easily collapse into a gimmick. Caro Claire Burke instead uses it as a scalpel.

The book runs on two timelines, the curated online life before and the unforgiving reality after, and the comedy comes from the gap between them. It is satire with a suspense engine underneath, which is why it can sit on our comedy and humour shelf without ever being merely light. The target is not one woman but a whole culture of performed womanhood.

On the evidence of this book, the writing is sharp, sceptical and oddly fond of its subject even while skewering it, a difficult balance to hold across a full-length novel.

Caro Claire Burke in audiobooks

Casting matters enormously here, and Rebecca Lowman is astute casting: the voice has to sell both the glossy performance of the influencer register and the panic underneath it, and it does. At close to fourteen hours the listen has room for both timelines to breathe.

There is no series to work through and no prior reading required, so this is simply where you begin. Try it if you like your fiction funny and faintly sinister, or if you have ever fallen down a lifestyle-content rabbit hole and wondered what was at the bottom. The audiobook is waiting below.