Is there an audiobook of The Wedding People?

Yes. The Wedding People has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Helen Laser.

How long is the The Wedding People audiobook?

The The Wedding People audiobook runs 12 hr 13 min.

What formats is The Wedding People available in?

On Amazon, The Wedding People comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

Our review

The Wedding People

Name: The Wedding People
Author: Alison Espach

Alison Espach

4.3/ 5 · Excellent

Alison Espach's The Wedding People sends a woman at the end of her rope to a grand Newport hotel that has been booked out for somebody else's wedding, then turns the collision into a comedy about staying alive. Expect sharp dialogue, an unlikely friendship between the stray guest and the bride, and far more feeling than the setup admits to.

Narrated by Helen Laser

Audiobook · 12 hr 13 min

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The Review

Our take

A hotel full of wedding guests is a machine for small talk, and Alison Espach drops into the middle of it the one person in the building with no reason left to be polite. Phoebe Stone arrives at the Cornwall Inn in Newport with no luggage, in a green dress bought for a life she no longer has, carrying a plan for the weekend that nobody else at the inn would recognize as a plan. Everyone assumes she is with the wedding. Then the bride knocks on her door, and the novel finds the engine it runs on for the next three hundred pages.

That engine is talk. Espach writes conversation with an ear for the third-most-honest thing a well-mannered person will say, and the scenes between Phoebe and the bride keep circling the same lovely problem from new angles: one woman says the unsayable because consequences have stopped applying to her, and the other, who has organized every detail of the weekend against disaster, turns out to have been waiting years for someone to ask her a real question. A rehearsal dinner here is never about the rehearsal dinner. It is about who at the table is still performing.

The comedy is exact rather than broad. Newport does a lot of work, all that inherited money and salt air making everybody's private catastrophe look faintly ridiculous from six feet away, and Espach is very funny about the specific vanity of people who have never had to be interesting. The plot is not hard to see coming. Once the pieces are on the board the shape of the ending sits there in plain view, and the opening chapters linger over description long enough that some readers stall before the friendship takes hold. It didn't cost me much. The pleasure is watching a woman talk herself, sentence by sentence, back into wanting things.

Why you should read

Readers who loved The Midnight Library's second chances
Funny novels that go somewhere genuinely serious
Voice-driven contemporary fiction built on dialogue
Book club picks about starting over at forty

What to expect

A comic surface over a dark opening premise
Talk-driven scenes with very little plot machinery
A slow first act before the friendship catches
An ending you see coming and enjoy anyway

What the book does best is the part it never announces. Phoebe wants to die when she gets there, and Espach refuses to soften that or convert it into a lesson; she simply keeps putting other people in the room, one after another, seating charts and toasts and small acts of terrible timing, until the room gets harder to walk out of. Phoebe is an English professor, and there is something right about a woman who has spent her career explaining other people's stories discovering she has been a very poor reader of her own. The last stretch is warm without being soft. Espach gives her a future without pretending the wreck behind her didn't happen.

Reviewed by Avery · How our reviews are written

Our verdict

4.3/ 5

Excellent

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Where to read or listen

Is there an audiobook of The Wedding People?: Yes. The Wedding People has an Audible audiobook edition, narrated by Helen Laser.
Listen free with Audible
We earn from qualifying Amazon purchases.
How long is the The Wedding People audiobook?: The The Wedding People audiobook runs 12 hr 13 min.
What formats is The Wedding People available in?: On Amazon, The Wedding People comes as a Kindle ebook, a paperback and a hardcover.

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Common questions

What is The Wedding People about?: A hotel full of wedding guests is a machine for small talk, and Alison Espach drops into the middle of it the one person in the building with no reason left to be polite. Phoebe Stone arrives at the Cornwall Inn in Newport with no luggage, in a green dress bought for a life she no longer has…
Is The Wedding People worth reading?: We scored The Wedding People 4.3 out of 5. Alison Espach's The Wedding People sends a woman at the end of her rope to a grand Newport hotel that has been booked out for somebody else's wedding, then turns the collision into a comedy about staying alive. Expect sharp dialogue, an unlikely friendship between the stray…

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