Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Children of Men
    Unavailable
    The Children of Men
    Unavailable
    The Children of Men
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Children of Men

    Written by P. D. James

    Narrated by David Case

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The Children of Men begins in England in 2021, in a world where all human males have become sterile and no child will be born again. The final generation has turned twenty-five, and civilization is giving way to strange faiths and cruelties, mass suicides and despair. Theodore Faron, Oxford historian and cousin to the omnipotent Warden of England, a dictator of great subtlety, has resigned himself to apathy. Then he meets Julian, a bright, attractive woman, who wants Theo to join her circle of unlikely revolutionaries, a move that may shatter his shell of passivity.… And maybe, just maybe, hold the key to survival for the human race.


    From the Trade Paperback edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 16, 2009
    ISBN9781415926154
    Unavailable
    The Children of Men
    Author

    P. D. James

    P. D. James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford in 1920. She worked in the National Health Service and the Home Office From 1949 to 1968, in both the Police Department and Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy, and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature. She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991.

    Related to The Children of Men

    Related audiobooks

    Science Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Soul Searchers

      May 7, 2023

      Soul Searchers
      4 min read

    • Article

      Breastfeeding Beats Chestfeeding

      Nov 16, 2022

      I sat across the table from the late April Ashley at a pre-pandemic Oldie lunch and thought her amazing. She was a beautiful old lady - she died in 2021 - as she once had been a beautiful young man. She made history as one of the first openly transge

      3 min read

    • Article

      100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time

      Oct 23, 2020

      100 Best Fantasy Books Of All Time
      27 min read

    • Article

      Plague On All Houses

      Aug 29, 2021

      Plague On All Houses
      2 min read

    • Article

      Great Reads

      Oct 6, 2022

      Growing up in 1973, Eleanor's home was strained by sorrow and the echoes of war that silenced her parents. And always her mother, Kitty's, bitterness, twisting and poisoning everything she touched. She thought she knew what made her parents this way…

      2 min read

    • Article

      BOOKS & PODCASTS

      Mar 16, 2023

      BOOKS & PODCASTS
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Books That Made Us

      Apr 2, 2023

      The Books That Made Us
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 8, 2024

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      Summer Book Reviews

      Dec 6, 2019

      by John le Carré Published by Viking (Penguin Books) ISBN 9780241401217 $32.99 The master storyteller brings his finely developed clandestine world into the age of Brexit, climate change, Putin and Trump, its protagonists weaving their duplicitous cr

      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Mar 30, 2021

      Aspiring writer Florence Darrow jumps at the chance to assist the celebrated, yet anonymous author Maud. But when, on a ‘research trip’ to Morocco, a car crash leads to Maud’s disappearance, Florence sees an opportunity to step into someone else’s li

      1 min read

    • Article

      International Books

      Aug 11, 2019

      “The thing about the past was that, no matter how far you ran or how fast you ran, it was always right behind you, snapping at your heels.” The past, present and future collide in Kate Atkinson’s fifth outing for Jackson Brodie, a retired copper turn

      5 min read

    • Article

      Church And State

      Sep 30, 2021

      We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 by Fintan O’Toole Head of Zeus, 624 pages, £25 Prominent Irish intellectual Fintan O’Toole’s latest book merges cameos from a self-proclaimed “boring” life with events, people and chan

      2 min read

    • Article

      Great Read

      Nov 2, 2022

      Great Read
      7 min read

    • Article

      Not One of Us

      Jan 21, 2020

      Not One of Us
      4 min read

    • Article

      7 BEST BOOKS of 2022

      Aug 10, 2022

      7 BEST BOOKS of 2022
      5 min read

    • Article

      7 BEST BOOKS of 2022

      Aug 10, 2022

      7 BEST BOOKS of 2022
      5 min read

    • Article

      What To Read While Social Distancing

      Mar 27, 2020

      What To Read While Social Distancing
      4 min read

    • Article

      7 BEST BOOKS of 2022

      Aug 10, 2022

      7 BEST BOOKS of 2022
      5 min read

    • Article

      Liberace With Attitude

      Apr 20, 2023

      Carl Abrahamsson Inner Traditions 2022 Pb, 424pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781644112410 Given the scope of available candidates for the title of Devil incarnate, one finds it difficult to imagine that Anton LaVey would even get a look in! LaVey was born in Chic

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Strange Death Of Tolerance

      Aug 23, 2023

      The silly donkeys at Coutts got their just deserts in the Nigel Farage affair. A few grossly overpaid execs stood down, and they will no doubt move on to even more overpaid positions. The irrepressibly perky Farage will feel he has won a great victor

      3 min read

    • Article

      This Issue’s Contributors

      Jan 21, 2021

      I am fascinated by the Dissolution of the Monasteries and have spent the last decade studying the subject, conducting excavations at Thornton Abbey and Monk Bretton Priory. Hugh argues that the Dissolution was not wanton destruction, but instead a hi

      1 min read

    • Article

      Beyond The Burn Line

      Oct 5, 2022

      Beyond The Burn Line
      6 min read

    • Article

      Science Fiction And Fantasy

      Jan 5, 2022

      AJ Elwood Titan Books 2021 Pb, 365pp, £8.99, ISBN 9781789096859 We have three wonderfully fortean concepts to start with. We all know that fairies, even if they might sometimes be pretty, delicate little winged creatures, are rarely benign, and in AJ

      4 min read

    • Article

      Summer Reading! 2020

      Jul 9, 2020

      Summer Reading! 2020
      11 min read

    • Article

      Book Club

      Jan 1, 2022

      Book Club
      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Apr 13, 2023

      Tony Santorella/Atlantic Books From the ingenious premise to its irresistible climax, Bored Gay Werewolf is an ungodly joy from start to finish. Brian is struggling to get his shit together. After dropping out of college, he just about manages to kee

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Reviews

      May 31, 2021

      Adam Cruise | Tafelberg | 9780624091578 | R295 It’s not about the bats, it’s about you and me – and our governments. The Covid-19 pandemic put the spotlight on how human expansion has led to an increase in zoonotic viruses jumping species, and calls

      5 min read

    Reviews for The Children of Men

    3.5/5

    1,356 ratings122 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Excellent! One of the best!
    • 4/5
      I'd been thinking about reading the source material for the movie that had been haunting me for years. The movie caught some of the feeling of it with extra drama and a very different ending. Her style was luxuriously upper class British that was enjoyable enough to make me forgive her for yet another book in the POV of a creepy guy.
    • 3/5
      I had some expectation for this book, as my book club has been reading dystopian novels for a while. This didn't shine though as the best. The author clearly has little experience in the genre, and my exceptions were clearly something quite else. At every plot point I was expecting something more exciting than what I was given, and ended up with feeling I'd been reading a rewriting of the new testament. If this had been my first meeting with a dystopi I'd might have liked it more, but there was just too many mistakes done by the author and the characters that I got impatient. If it wasn't for the book club I'd not read the whole book.
    • 3/5
      A little slow at the start, and I found the form -- flipping between diary entries by a detached Oxfordian and close 3rd person focused on same -- unnecessarily complex. That said, it was enjoyable, and some of the detail of the speculation on the societal effects of the loss of posterity was striking, unexpected and insightful.
    • 3/5
      The premise of this book is a fascinating one to explore, just not in this book. It was a slow plod that I thought would lead somewhere, but it never did. A big build up with a fizzle at the end. Anyway, nice descriptions and scene setting, leaden characters, slow plot, meh ending. That's why I gave it two and a half stars. YMMV
    • 4/5
      Great beginning and a disappointing ending.
    • 2/5
      In this case, broadening my horizons by reading from a genre outside my comfort zone has not been fruitful. The premise of a society that simply stops producing offspring is fascinating. Societal breakdown? Economies stalling? Manufacturing ceasing? Basic survival for an aged population? The simple act of the winding down of the human race? What treasures of insight would this book hold for me? Put simply, not much at all. On top of a lack of deep exploration of what might actually happen in the case of no more babies being born, the story was not convincing and the characters indecisive and wishy-washy. Although the novel didn't go so far as to offend me with its banality, it was more a case of finishing it, closing the book and going- meh, then moving on. If I ever read a book with that introduces each and every character with a detailed facial description again, I will know to discontinue immediately.
    • 4/5
      If you've seen the movie and haven't read the book yet, prepare to have your mind blown. It is unbelievable that the movie and the book even share the same title. They are completely different. Honestly, if they had named the movie something different, I never would have connected it to this wonderful book. The book is amazing; I love dystopian lit, and this book has everything that makes a good dystopian novel. I feel that this book could definitely hold its own among books like 1984, We, and The Handmaid's Tale.
    • 4/5
      There's a quiet sort of desperation to this book, and it moves from being slow and rather innocuous into something which is not just suspenseful, but tight and damning, piling moral question upon moral question in a sort of natural domino effect that a reader can't help but watch. When I began the book, I was reading perhaps ten pages at a time, and then putting it down easily. In my final two sittings, I read sixty pages until my eyes gave out over its small print, and then the final fifty. Out of a future that is infertile and hopeless, tightly controlled and mannered, James has asked the simplest question regarding what happens when a small beginning can be glimpsed in what appears to be a landscape of endings, and the result is impressive and smart.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      Read it in advance of seeing the movie adaptation. Dystopic science fiction is indeed one of my favorite genres but somehow I remember the book being much heavier on the religious allegories.
    • 3/5
      This is one of very few instances that I can think of in which the movie is actually better than the book. It's like The Handmaid's Tale, minus all the handmaids. The plot setup is interesting -what if, from tomorrow on, everyone became infertile? What would our society look like in 25 years? But James wastes what certainly has potential to be a fascinating story by having her characters endlessly reminisce about their Oxford days and class-conscious childhoods. Also, Clive Owen does not appear in this book. See why you should watch the movie? Then go read something like The Handmaid's Tale or Never Let Me Go. I don't know about you, but I prefer a less whiny apocalypse.
    • 2/5
      To my memory, this is the first book I've read that I liked the movie better than the book! Honestly, I was a bit disappointed with this one.
    • 4/5
      The Children of Men by P.D. James (No relation) is the story of a dystopian earth, set 25 years since the human race stopped giving birth. Like most good dystopian fiction The Children of Men gets to the big picture by focusing on the small one, the individual. In this case Theo, a 50 something university professor and cousin of the Warden of England who rules a dying society with an iron hand. Theo has taught his last real student as have all teachers, all day care center, all Sunday schools. Now he holds a few classes in Victorian history for a dwindling number of bored middle aged women, all looking to fill the emptiness in their lives that children once filled.During the first half of the book, Omega, James shows us what the world would be like without children. Through Theo's first person narrative and several chapters of third person narration, we see the complete structure of James's dystopian future. This sort of speculation is what makes dystopian fiction, and utopian fiction, fun. Just what would people do in this situation? Toy makers, of course, go out of business, except for doll makers who enjoy a boom in business selling very realistic dolls to the childless who push them around public parks in prams pretending the dolls are real. This trend does not last long though. Others become obsessed with raising cats, which they take into abandoned churches to christen as though they were children. The last generation of children, the Omegas, are practically worshipped as gods and grow up to be uncaring, unfeeling devils. Since there are no children to pass anything on to, there is little motive to preserve history and not much reason to work at all beyond keeping ones self alive. The Warden of England has been voted into office to keep crime at bay, to protect the people; no one is concerned that their own civil liberties have been sacrificed.Except for a handful of rebels. Halfway through the novel, Theo is approached by a former student who asks him to meet with his cousin and to state their case to him. They want an end to forced fertility testing, to the use of foreign labor, to the penal colony of the Isle of Man and a return to democratic elections. Theo agrees but finds his cousin unwilling to change anything. In the second section of the book, Alpha, Theo discovers that one of the rebels is pregnant. Because her baby will be the first one in a quarter century, the rebels believe that the Warden will seize her in order to use the baby to increase his hold on England and extend his power into the rest of the world. The mother-to-be, Julian, wants her baby to be born free, free of the Warden, free of prying doctors, free of the state police. Theo joins the rebels as the try to escape the city and the state police in order to find a safe place for the baby to be born. The Children of Men is a fascinating, tautly written thriller. The first section of the book, while really more of a speculative travelogue, is filled with suspense. Theo has secrets of his own that are revealed to the reader as he writes his journal and as he goes deeper into the rebellion against the state his cousin controls. The second half is a more traditional thriller, filled with escapes and near escapes, betrayals and plots, that keep the reader glued to the page. Throughout the book there is a humanity that lifts the story above its genre. A childless future is frightening to contemplate, but it gets at certain primal feelings, primal fears; it's one of those things that seem like one has always thought of but never thought of. Dystopian, just like utopian fiction, must be read as either a warning or a parable, the readers must interpret meaning for themselves. The Children of Men may mean different things to different readers, but it's a book that stays with the reader, long after the last page has been read.
    • 4/5
      Very different from the usual James book, but just as well written. Very well written in fact; with her usual brilliant characterisation, and images that bounce out from the words and lodge in your head. It is a thoughtful, compelling and powerful read. Theo is a complex but not particularly likeable anti-hero, who becomes transformed by the process of loving someone. There are plenty of themes to reflect on . . . the need for hope, the despair and futility that eats away at people like a cancer when there appears to be no future for the race, the nature of religion and the nature of power, among others. However one thing that didn't ring true at all in the dystopian times and I just cannot accept, is that interest in (and enjoyment of) sex would drop off across the whole population purely because procreation was no longer a possible outcome.Apparently there is a film (released in 2006) based very loosely on the story. I'm glad I didn't see it before reading the book.
    • 4/5
      Well written, disturbing and provocative. The further I got into it the more entranced I became, although I still am not quite clear how Julian and Theo got so involved when they hardly ever saw each other. Will now rent the movie and see the differences between the two. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      In 2021, Theodore Faron, an Oxford professor of history, specializing in the Victorian period, lives a life of quiet routine, looking to the "comforts of culture" to cushion the harsh realities of his life. No children have been born anywhere in the world since 1995. In a world obsessed with aging, the last generation of children, known as Omegas, have grown to a cruel and dissipated adulthood, and the truly aged are encouraged to commit suicide. This is a world where kittens are baptized and the state runs porn shops. On his fiftieth birthday, Theo starts a diary, for what he admits are selfish reasons. Theo ultimately winds up recording his memories of his cousin Xan, now the powerful and increasingly despotic Warden of Britain, and of his involvement with a revolutionary group, the Five Fishes. While the Fishes seem ill organized and willfully ignorant to Theo, one young woman, Julian, awakes him to the abuse of power in his ordered life. When she ultimately reveals her pregnancy to him, Theo abandons his life of comfort and reflection to help her.James has pulled off something unique: an engrossing novel with a group of largely unlikeable main characters. Theo is a stuffy prig, Xan is a depressingly average despot, Julian is delusional, her husband Rolf is a bully. Only the midwife Miriam gives the book any warmth or feeling. Calling it sci-fi is almost a misnomer -- yes, it takes place in a dystopic future, but the dilemmas faced by Theo are not unique to the civilization or the time. However, James adds many convincing details to flesh out her setting, and fans of softer sci-fi will find much to like here.This book wears it's age, a bit, as there is no discussion of cloning or stem-cells or any other of the reproductive technologies that have emerged since the early 1990's. Like V for Vendetta this book is profoundly rooted in the politics of the Thatcher administration, and may loose some relevance with readers not familiar with the England of those times. Slow to start, but engrossing, this is thoughtful sci-fi for mature readers. I have not yet seen the film adaptation of this book, but can say that it is either profoundly different from the novel, or that Clive Owen is severely miscast.
    • 5/5
      Man, have I got a lot to say about this one. For those of you who have seen the movie, the book is drastically different, to the point of having very little in common. For once though, it didn't seem to be such a bad thing. The movie was a groundbreaking, moving work, and it spurred me into reading the book. The book is the same, just very very differently executed. Let's just say the character's have the same names, and humanity is still sterile, and there is a pregnant woman. The similarities end there. Highly recommended, regardless.
    • 3/5
      I shamefully admit I only bought this because I loved the movie. This story is bit too scifi for me, but still - PD James has an amazing literary voice, so it was worth my while. Completely different to the movie, though.
    • 3/5
      I've waited a week after reading this book to write a review because I was on the fence as to whether or not I liked it and didn't even know where I would begin describing my views. At this point I'm still unable to decide, as I feel there are a lot of contradicting and unquestioned answers with the story and yet it is thought-provoking. The three stars reflects my inability to decide or verbalize, leaving me believing it is good enough to read but not the classic it had potential to become.
    • 4/5
      I picked this up on a whim because I had seen the movie and had also enjoyed some of the author's mystery novels in the past. I was surprised by how completely different the book was, but in a good way. I appreciated the artistic value of the film but didn't necessarily have a good time watching it, while I actually enjoyed the process of reading the book.PD James is generally a very bleak writer and she effectively creates for us a dystopian Britain with no children and no hope of a ...moreI picked this up on a whim because I had seen the movie and had also enjoyed some of the author's mystery novels in the past. I was surprised by how completely different the book was, but in a good way. I appreciated the artistic value of the film but didn't necessarily have a good time watching it, while I actually enjoyed the process of reading the book.PD James is generally a very bleak writer and she effectively creates for us a dystopian Britain with no children and no hope of a future. The book is character-driven and the plot moves slowly, but I found it a fascinating exploration of human nature. The switches between first-person entries in Theo's diary and third-person narration were for the most part very smooth. Theo is an interesting narrator, very self-aware in acknowledging his many personal failings as such but also rather depressingly resigned to them.Different and thought-provoking.
    • 4/5
      Twenty years ago, when the world was already half convinced that our species had lost for ever the power to reproduce, the search to find the last-known human birth became a universal obsession, elevated to a matter of national pride, an international contest as ultimately pointless as it was fierce and acrimonious.No human child has been born on earth for the last twenty-five years, due to universal male sterility. On his fiftieth birthday, which is coincidentally also the day on which the last child to have been born dies in a bar brawl, Theodore Faron, cousin and former advisor to the Warden of England (the dictator who rules the UK as head of a council of five), starts a diary to document the second half of his life and the fading away of the human race. It's an interesting premise and the author's ideas of how society was changing as the population shrank and aged were believable. I did have some quibbles about the plot, but I can't post them here as it would involve major spoilers.I read this in the pouring rain on my journey home after my holiday, the weather suiting the sombre subject matter perfectly.
    • 3/5
      I don't think P.D. James has ever written a truly "bad" book, but this was not one of my favorites. I will say, however, that I watched the film immediately after finishing the book just for comparison, and if you're remotely interested in the story, do yourself a favor and read the book. Not only is the film a very poor adaptation of the book (the themes are strikingly different), but it simply isn't a very good film. The plot is so disjointed that if I hadn't read the book, I'd have had a difficult time following the story.
    • 3/5
      I don't know what I think about this book. It's undeniably well-done, but aside from that I'm unsure. Her prose, at times, gets descriptively out of hand by just a hair, but it was all right overall.The character of Theo is well-done, but there's little explanation for why he's become the way he is: he waxes all morose about himself for being unable to feel the emotion of love, but it's never really explained how or why he became that way. Albert Camus' Mersault didn't feel love, but that's infinitely more believable because he didn't feel much else, either. Theo just moons around moping about how he's never loved, and I got sick of that. She tried to explain it by showing how no one ever showed him love, and though that's generally enough of an explanation for me, I still found it pretty irritating after a while.P.D. James, however, really thought through the whole idea of what a gradually-dying society would be like. I generally found it convincing. I have a few small quibbles-- if Xan keeps the society so safe, why do the Painted Faces exist, and why do they roam at large? Shouldn't he be able to quash them? Also, I fail to see why the Church of England should have fallen apart and abandoned traditional masses. It doesn't make sense. Religions in various other parts of the world clearly survived the Omega, but for some reason she's got a recognizable English people operating in a British society which, while remaining wholly religious in in its characters' behaviors and cultural references, seems to contain no religions. It doesn't make sense. The leaders who promote religious fads in America, briefly mentioned in the beginning of the book, seem reasonable-- but the idea that the CoE should have abandoned the traditional mass and fallen into total disrepair strikes me as a contrivance. It probably means something to Brits that I can't identify-- it's probably supposed to symbolize some profound collapse of society and get you in the gut somehow, but it doesn't work on me. I found it a bit silly.I have no quarrel with the fact that she chose not to reveal the reason for the Omega, and I don't mind that she stopped the story at the birth and did not go on to explain the rejuvenation of society. The book is about the people and about the ideas, not about the situation. She was wise to stay away from that aspect of science fiction. This isn't hard sci-fi; it trends to the speculative end of the genre.And one last complaint, I swear: WHY the f is Xan named that? There's absolutely no reason for it. None whatsoever. It is a jarring factor. The rest of the book is so typical: she's trying to show what would happen to regular people in a regular society if children ceased to be born. But throw in someone named 'Xan' and all the verisimilitude goes out the window. Stupid decision, in my opinion. She did well enough painting him as the totally-pragmatic, emotionless dictator; why did she feel the need to screw with his name? I kept wondering why the hell she had named him that, kept wondering if it hinted at some kind of alternate history situation within the world of the story, kept wondering if Xan was supposed to be asian or something-- and none of the pieces fit together. It's the kind of lameass name some fanfiction writer gives a character, not the kind of name an established author uses.I recommend the book, in the end. It's not spectacular, but it holds attention.
    • 4/5
      I usually try and read the book before I see the film, but in this case I think it's better that I did it the other way round. I was able to enjoy the film without getting worked up over how different it was from the book.The book itself is great, with truly masterful characterisation. No-one is either a saint or a demon (although the Warden gets called the Devil on more than one occasion) and every character is more or less beautifully flawed. The ending has hope, but not too much, and the seeds of future tension are sowed along with the plans for improvement.
    • 3/5
      A book I had to read for a RL SFF book group. I never saw the movie. I have never read anything else by P.D. James.The book just didn't work for me. It was too thin in terms of plot and story. I didn't ever believe the motivation of the main character to get involved.I didn't like the writing and the characters seemed to be cliches. All in all below average.
    • 3/5
      I read this book after seeing the movie and I was a little disappointed. I thought the book was mediocre, while the movie was excellent, one of the rare times when I've experienced this anomoly.
    • 3/5
      This book could have been a lot better than it was. The setting was obviously well imagined and the plot was interesting. The author, however, chose to design it partially as a memoir of the main character and to write in third person. I don't think that this worked for the book's betterment. This, combined with an akward and incosistant speeding up and slowing down of plot, cost it a star in my opinion. Still, Priest's main character was one of the most believable and completely illustrated narrorators that I have read in a long time.
    • 3/5
      Alright. Looks like it will be a better movie than book. too much attempt at thought-provoking without achieving it.
    • 3/5
      I thoroughly enjoy P.D. James as a mystery/crime writer but I found Children of Men a bit hard to get through. It just didn't keep my attention all the way through - some parts were very compelling but my mind was wandering during others. I don't often read futuristic books. This might be an option for high school though - I think we should cast about for alternatives to 1984 and Animal Farm. I do plan to see the movie soon.
    • 5/5
      This is one of the most beautiful books I've read in years. I watched the movie first (because I love Clive), but when I read the novel I was so frustrated that the book was NOTHING like the movie--why even bill it as the same story? The book was far richer, far more dark, far more lovely. The style of this novel is gorgeous, too.