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The Little Red Chairs

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The Little Red Chairs

By: Edna O'Brien
Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
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About this listen

When a wanted war criminal masquerading as a healer settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell, and in this searing novel Edna O'Brien charts the consequence of that fatal attraction.

This is a story about love, the artifice of evil and the terrible necessity of accountability in our shattered, damaged world.

©2015 Edna O’Brien (P)2016 W F Howes Ltd Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

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Critic reviews

"The great Edna O'Brien has written her masterpiece." (Philip Roth)
" The Little Red Chairs is a daring invention set at the bloody crossroads where worlds collide: savage, tender and true." (John Banville)
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Started off well but lost me soon with its change of focus. I understand the point of this but I couldn't settle and longed to skip forward
Great performance by the narrator though

Not for me

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This book went right under my skin, Juliet Stevenson is a brilliant reader, all these different characters she portrayed with her voice.
However, the book should come with a warning that it contains extrem violent descriptions ... I had to skip chapters.

The Little Red Chairs

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Heart breaking book. I read it and it made me grateful for my own home and a snippet of understanding of the ache to be able to live in your country of choice with people you can trust. How fragile we are, and attitudes change by the day.

A good read..as they say

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I know that for me this book did not work, it has many good attributes but it never managed to engage me with the main character or the message proposed by the book. Fidelma the main character is such a contradiction and so unintelligent sometimes it hurts. The village where the story starts is not real in all its minutiae, the locals discuss the Aenids And Didos dilema or spend time plying A Midsummer Night's Dream. This are not the normal endeavors of working people.
Fidelma applies for a job and finishes the application with a quote by Lord Byron, her african boss likes this and gives her the job as an office cleaner.
Every emigrant character in the story talks of the horrors they have faced openly and with an introspection that is hard to believe; in my experience people that are traumatised by violence and suffering find it very hard to expose or even come to terms with those feeling much less expose them to strangers. They also speak in broken english but with vocabularies that are far beyond a recently acquired second language. All this inequities come across as pretentious and artificial, breaking the reality the writer can create.

It is no secret that the story is about the atrocities in Bosnia, Dr Vlad is well described and a very interesting character but he is not on the book enough to be eloquent about his crimes, he for the most part denies them, but stains fidelma with their encounter and she absorbs a kind of moral responsibility that is just not believable.
The potential in this book was great and it is achieved in some moments with ease with some moving and beautiful passages but they are almost too disparate to create a single body or continuity of plot.

The reader is excellent and deals with the many voices with ease.

The horror the horror

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The narration for me as an Irish person was dreadful. The accents were clichéd and patronising. The Irish police were portrayed as 'village idiots', and surnames mispronounced, which could have very easily been rectified. Every Eastern European sounded like 'Vlad the Impaler'. Very disappointing.

I love Edna's writing

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This is a very moving story of trauma, love, loss and deception, told from the perspective of a woman who, unwittingly, falls in love with the 'Beast of Sarajevo'. There are other voices which speak of their trauma and its lasting damage. Is the 'Beast' a man of great charm, a healer with warmth and compassion, or is he the hate filled monster, responsible for the brutal deaths of many people in Sarajevo? Wonderfully read by Juliet Stevenson.

Sarajevo

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The attempts at accents were really hard to bear and bordered on racial parodies. The pronunciation of Irish words were also off. I suspect it’s better in it’s written rather than audio version.

Terrible accents

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Interesting story, gripping in parts but annoyingly laboured in others. Learned a fair bit about a time in European history that had passed me by, to my shame. Was a very difficult listen in parts because of the atrocities which we all know are still happening throughout the world today. Most humbling. But on a happier note - what a fantastic narrator! I knew Juliet Stevenson is a good actress but - WOW. I still can't believe I wasn't listening to a play with a cast of many. Truly wonderful.

Fabulous narration!

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A disturbing story and not one that I particularly liked. At times l wasn't sure where Edna O Brien was going with the tail. It felt disjointed and not at all like anything l had read of hers before.

The Little Red Chairs

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Outstanding narration throughout.

This starts off as a rural tale set in Ireland. Edna O’ Brian’s writing is so understated it’s difficult to see what’s coming as the story moves to violation and genocide. I enjoyed the complex narrative and it’s a thought provoking tale of betrayal, loss, love and deeper issues, based on fact, involving war crimes.

Challenging issue explored with sensitivity

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