Lisa Ridzén Audiobooks

When the Cranes Fly South: literary fiction carried by Ifan Huw Dafydd

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.4/5 average

12 listener ratings

Who is Lisa Ridzén?

A title borrowed from the birds is rarely just scenery. Cranes flying south mark a season closing, and a novel that takes its name from the sight is telling you, before anything else happens, that it will be keeping an eye on time passing.

Lisa Ridzen arrives in our catalogue with the recording filed under fiction and literature, alongside a secondary tag for comedy and humour that is best read as a note about tone rather than a promise of jokes. Work shelved that way tends to be the sort that finds the funny side of difficult things, which is a very different proposition from a comic novel and often a more durable one. Seven and a half hours makes for a compact literary listen, the length of a novel that trusts compression.

Lisa Ridzén in audiobooks

Ifan Huw Dafydd reads, and a voice with that much lived-in texture matters in fiction of this kind: the register has to hold tenderness and dryness in the same sentence without tipping into either.

Listener scores are warm, though only a handful of verdicts have been logged so far, so treat the figure as an early signal rather than a settled one. This is a good candidate for anyone who wants literary fiction that fits inside a couple of quiet evenings and does not mistake brevity for slightness. See what is listed below.