Catherine Miller Audiobooks

The Gin Shack on the Beach: seaside comfort fiction with a stubborn streak

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.3/5 average

572 listener ratings

Who is Catherine Miller?

There is a whole tradition of British seaside novels in which the weather is unreliable, the neighbours are nosy, and somebody decides to do something splendid rather later than anyone expected. Catherine Miller’s The Gin Shack on the Beach plants itself squarely in it, with a beach hut, a bottle of gin and a refusal to go quietly.

The tone is comic without being weightless. Underneath the warmth sit the ordinary subjects of a life lived in a small place: independence, friendship, and the business of deciding what you actually want next. It is handled with a light enough touch that the book never lectures.

This is the feel-good novel done properly, with characters who have edges, jokes that land, and an ending you can see coming and want anyway.

Catherine Miller in audiobooks

Helen Lloyd reads it, and her comic timing does a great deal for the material; at just under eight hours it is one of the brighter, shorter listens of its kind. Several hundred listeners have rated it well, which is the reassurance a comfort read needs.

It heads up the Gin Shack sequence, so this is the natural place to begin before carrying on with the company you have joined. Best taken with a deckchair and low expectations of the British weather. The audiobook is below; the gin is your own responsibility.