In The Mom of Bold Action, one of nine short stories in George Saunders’s Liberation Day, a children’s author struggles to come up with ideas while working in her kitchen. But then inspiration strikes after her son is pushed to the ground by a homeless man and comes home with a bloody face and “weaving like a little drunk”.
The actor and Saturday Night Live stalwart Tina Fey veers between belligerence and neurosis as she narrates this oddball tale about a woman wrestling with her conscience and inescapable inner monologue. “You are trapped in you,” the woman says, ominously. When her husband reads her new story, he is inspired to visit revenge on the man who hurt their son, only he targets the wrong person. “The world was harsh. Too harsh,” concludes our protagonist. “Make one mistake, pay for it the rest of your life.”
Moral quandaries abound in this variously funny, poignant and surreal collection. Love Letter, read by Michael McKean, finds a grandfather writing to his grandson and bemoaning his own inaction while the country was taken over by a “clownish” and distinctly Trumpian leader. Meanwhile, the title story, narrated by Saunders, is set in a dystopian world where three “Speakers” have had their brains wiped and are imprisoned by a family who make them perform musical re-enactments of the battle of the Little Bighorn; when help arrives, the prisoners wonder whether they should accept it. Such is humanity’s capacity for denial and obstinacy, Saunders tells us, it would ignore a lifeline that could transform its fortunes.
• Liberation Day is available via Bloomsbury Publishing, 7hr 6 min
Further listening
TV: Big Adventures on the Small Screen
Peter Kay, HarperCollins, 7hr 38 min
The comedian reflects on his love of television, with the help of some of his best-known characters, including Phoenix Nights’ Brian Potter and Britain’s Got the Pop Factor’s Geraldine McQueen.
Doppelganger
Naomi Klein, Penguin Audio, 14hr 47 min
Inspired by being endlessly mistaken for the author Naomi Wolf, Klein delves into a “mirror world” of conspiracy theorists and online grifters in a quest to uncover the nature of truth. Read by the author.
