Sally Hepworth Audiobooks

Mad Mabel: Australia's youngest convicted murderer, eighty one and still breaking rules

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Who is Sally Hepworth?

Sally Hepworth writes the sort of novel that gets passed round a book group in a fortnight. Australian and based in Melbourne, she made her name in 2015 with The Secrets of Midwives and has spent the decade since perfecting a distinctive register: domestic fiction with a blade in it, where the tension comes not from strangers in the dark but from mothers, sisters, daughters in law and the things families agree never to say.

The Good Sister, narrated in part by a young woman who experiences the world rather differently from those around her, won the Davitt Award for best adult crime novel in 2021 and is still the book most often pressed on newcomers. Since then she has become a fixture on bestseller lists on both sides of the Pacific.

Her real gift is comic timing under pressure. Hepworth can be funny on one line and genuinely upsetting on the next, and she never lets a character be only one thing.

Sally Hepworth in audiobooks

Mad Mabel is the Hepworth title with us, and it is among her best. Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty one, gloriously bad tempered and minding her own business in a quiet Melbourne suburb until a neighbour turns up dead and the street starts whispering. It emerges that Elsie was once famous under another name: Mad Mabel Waller, the youngest person ever convicted of murder in Australia.

Hannah Fredrickson narrates, and Elsie’s voice is the whole pleasure of the thing, dry as a bone and entirely without self pity. Across nine hours the novel works as a mystery, as a portrait of old age and as a rather moving argument about second chances.

It has drawn an enormous and enthusiastic listener response. Start it below, and good luck stopping.