• The Girl with All the Gifts

  • By: M. R. Carey
  • Narrated by: Finty Williams
  • Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (471 ratings)

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The Girl with All the Gifts  By  cover art

The Girl with All the Gifts

By: M. R. Carey
Narrated by: Finty Williams
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Editorial reviews

‘Not every gift is a blessing.’ In M. R. Carey’s thrilling audiobook, Melanie is a special child – The Girl with All the Gifts. She has an unusually high IQ, and yet she does not understand why she is subject to such high security – cared for at gunpoint, locked in a cell, strapped to a wheelchair. She loves school and tells her teacher, Helen Justineau, what she plans to do when she grows up, but Miss Justineau just looks sad. Narrated by the wonderful Finty Williams, The Girl with All the Gifts is available for download from Audible.

Publisher's summary

Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award 2014

Not every gift is a blessing.

Melanie is a very special girl. Dr Caldwell calls her 'our little genius'.

Every morning, Melanie waits in her cell to be collected for class. When they come for her, Sergeant keeps his gun pointing at her while two of his people strap her into the wheelchair. She thinks they don't like her. She jokes that she won't bite, but they don't laugh.

Melanie loves school. She loves learning about spelling and sums and the world outside the classroom and the children's cells. She tells her favourite teacher all the things she'll do when she grows up.

Melanie doesn't know why this makes Miss Justineau look sad.

Emotionally charged and gripping from beginning to end, The Girl with all the Gifts is the most powerful and affecting thriller you will listen to this year.

The phenomenal word-of-mouth best seller The Girl with all the Gifts is now a major film on widespread distribution starring Glenn Close, Gemma Arterton and Paddy Considine.

©2014 M. R. Carey (P)2014 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"A great read that takes hold of you and doesn´t let go." (John Ajvide Lindqvist, author of Let The Right One In)
"Brilliant... Gripping right to the end." ( Sunday Times best-selling author Carole Matthews)

What listeners say about The Girl with All the Gifts

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Wholly Unique

Would you consider the audio edition of The Girl with All the Gifts to be better than the print version?

I haven't read the print version, but I thoroughly enjoyed the audio. There were some fantastic quotables that I would have liked to underline or at least page back to, but otherwise I'm quite satisfied.

Have you listened to any of Finty Williams’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

No, but I enjoyed this performance.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Carey writes so touchingly about Melanie that my heart wants to break. I adore how she gets the reader closer and closer to her characters. The characters are also fallible, and sometimes downright unlikeable, but generally not stereotypically so. They seem human. Sometimes Dr Caldwell seemed a bit like the Mad Scientist stereotype, though...

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"I won't hurt you. I just want to examine you."

Ten-year-old Melanie thinks she's a normal girl (maybe a little better at maths and myths than her classmates) who'll grow up to be a princess and to maybe rescue her beloved teacher Miss Justineau from monsters. To Miss Justineau, Melanie is a special child. To Sergeant Parks, she is a dangerous monster. To Private Gallagher, she is uncanny. To Dr. Caldwell, she is Test Subject Number 1.

That complexity is one of the virtues of M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), a zombie genre retelling of the Greek myth about Pandora (whose name, Melanie explains, means "the girl with all the gifts"). All five point of view characters are right and wrong about Melanie, and reading to find out if and how they'll learn they're wrong and right is a suspenseful pleasure--if pleasure is the right word for a story set in a near future twenty years after a parasitic fungus mutated so as to colonize human hosts, commandeering their nervous systems and consuming their brains to turn people into "hungries," virtually mindless predators driven to eat raw meat to provide protein to the fungus, resulting in "the Breakdown" of civilization and the probable eventual extinction of homo sapiens.

Narrated from Melanie's point of view, the first three of seventy-four chapters recall Never Let Me Go, for she is confined to a place with her life organized around classes, and her fellow pupils and she are destined for a special terminal purpose, which her favorite teacher, Miss Justineau, is finding increasingly difficult to deal with. Melanie and her classmates live in small individual cells on a kind of military base. Despite not being free to leave the cellblock, despite not even being able to leave her cell unless she's strapped head and foot to a wheel chair, Melanie has picked up various clues about her world from what her teachers and to Sergeant Parks, who's in charge of the kids' confinement, say. But she still doesn't quite know what she is.

After a band of "junkers," "survivalist assholes" who live by scavenging, pay the base a call, the novel kicks into high page-turning gear. Although Carey includes some typical zombie genre tropes (e.g., the old trapped in a house surrounded by zombies situation), he does most everything with a refreshing, unsparing, and convincing authenticity, while adding enough surprises and fresh takes on the typical tropes to make his book bracing. And because we care about his characters, it's all very suspenseful.

Yes, the strongest part of this novel is its convincing point of view characters, each with their own personal history shaping and driving them, often in conflict with others: Miss Justineau (psychologist brought in to study the children's emotional responses and cognitive processes), Dr. Caldwell (uber scientist out to save homo sapiens via vivisection), scar-faced Sergeant Parks (essential soldier aiming to do his job), Private Gallagher (hapless, gormless, sweet). And wonderful Melanie of course. She wishes her name were Pandora, because she has learnt that Pandora didn't only release harmful things into the world but also some good things and figures that Pandora shouldn't be blamed because Zeus made her with curiosity and set up the whole trap. She's like any kid sensually experiencing and building an overwhelming new world around herself--and she's something very different. She has great presence and poise, fears and bravery.

Carey works in plenty of allusions to Greek/Roman myths (like Acteon) and legends (like The Aeneid). And his similes/metaphors are apt, telling, vivid, fresh, sometimes humorous.
--"The laugh you'd make if you rubbed out a mistake in a sum and accidentally tore the paper."
--"Her first taste of blood and warm flesh gives her a rush of pleasure bigger than she is… the part of her that can think bends in the cataract of mindless pleasure and hunger, and she goes on eating, feeling like a torrent of waterfall poured in a cup."
--Hungries standing still in different stages of decomposition "look like they're posing for paintings."
--"a fine fractal froth" of spores.

It is not a horror fantasy novel so much as a science fiction suspense novel. The biology of the fungus is convincingly detailed, with plenty of scientific language and behavior. As with much of the best sf, it comments on how we live now: "It's like before the breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find."

And the ending! It is perfect: surprising, inevitable, disturbing, and moving.

The audiobook is finely read by Flinty Williams. She is the kind of reader who doesn't try to perform vocal gymnastics to differentiate among different characters, but only slightly lowers or raises her voice for men or kids, etc., and just reads every word and sentence with pitch perfect pronunciation, pacing, and emphasis. And she has an appealing British accent, voice, and manner.

People who like the zombie genre's potential and are willing to sample its more intelligent and original examples, like Daryl Gregory's Raising Stony Mayhall (2011), should like this book. (Refreshingly, it doesn't appear to be the first in a series.)

**Note: Just because one of the main characters is ten years old, don't think that this is exactly a YA book: its attack on human pride may be disturbing, and many scenes are graphic.**

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4 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Fabulous!

I listen to a lot of audiobooks, in lots of different genres, and every now and then you come across one that is extra good. And I have to say 'The Girl with Al the Gifts' is really quite wonderful.
It's really well written, and the narration is perfect. I loved everything about it!

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3 people found this helpful

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excellent

not a dull moment in the whole story, simply fantastic in every way! definitely recommend

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent, gripping story from start to end

Narrator was superb, as was the story. Made this genre accessible even for those who may not usually choose to read this kind of book. Riveting. I raced through it, but now wish there was more!

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Strong start, ultimately disappointing finish

A good performance by the narrator and fairly well written - but the story fell flat in the end as a lot of the theory didn't stack up.
I dont know how to explain it without giving away the whole story - but the girl, who is the one with 'all the gifts' is a product of a particular event...and the whole crux of the story is completely undermined by the final scenes. So while you're meant to be shaken by the dramatic ending, to me it didn't add up at all. Meh.

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Wonderful

This book is the proof that it doesn't matter what the subject is, what's important is the writing. If you have to choose one book to read this year, this should be it.

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A page turner (or audio binger?) indeed

This is one of the more original stories I've heard. it reveals itself slowly, with surprise, suspense and emotions on each step.
couldn't recommend it enough.

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The best zombie story

I have been in love with this story since hearing the short story version of it (Iphigenia at Aulis, please listen to or read it as well for a slightly different but equally amazing story!)
The characterization, the premise, the dynamics - all beautifully crafted.
Finty Williams is a terrific narrator.

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Holy crap!! The end was AMAZING!!

The end to thIs book took it from a 8/10 to a 10/10!!I highly recommend this book!!

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