The Tightrope Walkers Audiobook

Quotes

• “Almond’s magnetic narrative conveys the sounds and heat of the shipyards, the smells of the circus tent where Dom and Holly see the tightrope walkers, the quality of the light at sunset after a satisfying day. And he tells of the tightrope humans walk between social divides, sanity and insanity, faith and doubt, friendship and sex, what we’re born to, what we can rise above—and what traps us. Mesmerizing.”

  — Shelf Awareness (starred review)

• “Powerfully realistic…Almond’s characteristic penetrating writing and finely drawn characters are on full display.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “A tour de force. Almond’s gifted prose sets readers firmly in the grim, gray-skied setting of a post-World War II British town inhabited by deeply layered and well-crafted characters. The use of a thick working-class dialect for many of the protagonists yields immersive dialogue that might have been off-putting in a lesser author’s hands. Dominic’s development takes place among moments of overwhelming bleakness and his experiences with the redemptive powers of human connection and art. The balance between these is precarious and realistic…An absolute must-have.”

  — School Library Journal (starred review)

• “There’s no cool here, no distancing irony or comforting hipness. It’s all intense, profoundly unsettling emotion…The novel is Shakespearean in its breadth, earthiness, and emotional pitch…[A] difficult and brilliant novel.”

  — Horn Book (starred review)

• “Almond poetically plumbs the depths of his 1950s and 1960s childhood to explore themes of violence, war, God, creativity, beauty, death, art, the soul, our animal selves, whether we ever grow up or can really know each other—in short, life.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “Teens will feel the events most viscerally—the brutishness, the love, the rejections. Adults, meanwhile, will bring their own world-weary self-knowledge, which cuts in its own way. Wild and reckless, heartbreaking and hopeful—this elegy on life is not to be missed.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

• “In prose that reads like richly imagistic poetry, Dom sorts through what it means to walk a metaphorical tightrope…The interplay between the characters and their environments results in a stunningly human and humanizing story.”

  — Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (starred review)