Emma Gray Audiobooks

My Farming Life: a first-person account of the working year on the land

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.7/5 average

1 listener rating

Who is Emma Gray?

First person is the whole proposition of My Farming Life. A book about farming and a book from inside farming are different animals, and the title commits to the second: the year is lived rather than surveyed, and the listener is expected to keep pace with it.

Our catalogue cross-shelves the title under home and garden, sports and outdoors, and science and engineering, which is a fair reflection of how many things a working farm actually is at once. Weather, machinery, animals and practical knowledge all sit inside the same account, and Emma Gray reads here as a chronicler of that daily reality rather than an advocate for it.

Emma Gray in audiobooks

Helen McAlpine narrates across eight hours and thirty-four minutes, a length that allows the seasons to turn properly instead of compressing them into anecdote. Only a single listener rating has been logged so far, far too thin a base for the score to mean anything, so it is best set aside entirely.

Come for the texture of the work: lambing, weather, long days and the unglamorous mechanics of keeping a farm running. Anyone who reads rural non-fiction for the detail rather than the idyll will be at home here. The recording is on the shelf below, running time and all.