The Adults - Caroline Hulse, Sarah Ovens, Penelope Rawlins, Peter Kenny

"The Adults" is a story of two middle-class English couples spending Christmas together at a cabin in a forest in Yorkshire (this is England, so think very, very small forest). The twist is that the party is made up of two people who are divorced from each other, the seven-year-old-daughter and their current partners. What could possibly go wrong?

 

This has me laughing even before I made it to the first chapter. The prologue  defines the word adults, then gives an extract from the "Happy Forest" holiday brochure, describing the forest as "a place where you make memories that will last a lifetime,"

 

Then we go straight to a phone call that goes something like.

 

"Hello? Is that emergency services? He's been shot. We're at the archery course, next to the Elves smoking shelter. Please come quickly. There's so much blood."

 

This juxtaposition, delivered entirely straight, had me laughing into my morning coffee.

 

The book then winds back to each of the new partners discovering that how they're going to be spending Christmas.

 

It's a great setup for an audiobook. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one of the characters and each character has its own narrator, one of whom is one onf mf my favourites. Peter Kenney.

 

You can hear an extract here:

 

https://soundcloud.com/orionbooks/the-adults-by-caroline-hulse-read-by-multi-voice

 

I'm going to use this book for the Festus Door. Book Task.