Nina Stibbe’s fourth novel is set in the fictional town of Brankham in Rutland and finds Susan Faye Warren meeting best friend Norma and husband Roy on the same day in the early 1990s.
She encounters Roy, a keen golfer eight years her senior, while eating breakfast in a cafe near The Pin Cushion, the haberdashery shop where she has a Saturday job. Norma is the daughter of the shop’s owner, and is drafted in one summer as acting manager. She and Susan, an English undergraduate, immediately hit it off despite a warning from Norma’s mother that they will never be true friends.
One Day I Shall Astonish the World goes on to trace the ups and downs of Susan and Norma’s friendship over three decades. As Susan gives up her studies and navigates marriage and motherhood with Roy, Norma lives a carefree life of social engagements and international travel, all the while building a glittering career in academia.
The narrator is actor Joanna Scanlan, who makes the most of Susan’s crisp observations: her sister-in-law is “clinically irritating” while her husband’s ex “once forced a boyfriend to the cinema at knife-point to see a film he didn’t fancy”. Scanlan imbues Susan’s seemingly trivial preoccupations (she longs for a front door made of pine rather than plastic) with gentle pathos.
It’s no wonder Stibbe is often compared with Alan Bennett and the Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend in her quirky portraits of small-town English life but, in depicting the interior lives of quietly disappointed women, Stibbe is in a class of her own.
• One Day I Shall Astonish the World is available from Penguin Audio, 9hr 54min
Further listening:
As Good As It Gets
Romesh Ranganathan, Penguin Audio, 5hr 33min
The hardest working man in show business reflects on modern adulthood, covering topics including sex, friendship, surviving holidays and the iniquities of being a parent.
Win Every Argument
Medhi Hasan, Macmillan, 8hr 11min
The journalist, interviewer and news anchor narrates his guide to public debating and the art of communicating with flair and confidence.
