Swan Song

By: Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott

Narrated by: Debora Weston

Length: 17 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2019

They told him everything.

He told everyone else.

Over countless martini-soaked Manhattan lunches, they shared their deepest secrets and greatest fears. On exclusive yachts sailing the Mediterranean, on private jets streaming towards Jamaica, on Yucatán beaches in secluded bays, they gossiped about sex, power, money, love and fame. They never imagined he would betray them so absolutely.

In the autumn of 1975, after two decades of intimate friendships, Truman Capote detonated a literary grenade, forever rupturing the elite circle he’d worked so hard to infiltrate. Why did he do it, knowing what he stood to lose? Was it to punish them? To make them pay for their manners, money and celebrated names? Or did he simply refuse to believe that they could ever stop loving him? Whatever the motive, one thing remains indisputable: nine years after achieving wild success with In Cold Blood, Capote committed an act of professional and social suicide with his most lethal of weapons...words.

A dazzling debut about the line between gossip and slander, self-creation and self-preservation, Swan Song is the tragic story of the literary icon of his age and the beautiful, wealthy, vulnerable women he called his Swans.

‘Writers write. And one can’t be surprised if they write what they know.’

©2018 Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott (P)2018 Penguin Random House UK

Critic reviews

"A completely fascinating novel and a marvellously skillful re-imagining of real people, times and places. Outstanding." (William Boyd)

"Scandalous, frenetic, amusing and tragic." (Daily Mail)

"Our generation’s The Secret History." (Pendora)

Oh, Darling...

Every year or so I find myself discovering a book that is so good that if I discovered it on Audible I have to rush out to buy it in hard copy or vice versa, and I end up owning both the audiobook and hard copy. As I wrote in my Goodreads review, I’m pretty confident that I doubt very much if there will be a book that comes along to knock this one off its pedestal. I’m pretty confident that 2019 will be historically known as “the year of Swan Song”.
Truman Capote has always held a certain fascination for me and I wasn’t sure that I would appreciate a dramatization that filled in parts of his life that weren’t known. This book is so good that I suddenly find myself scrambling to remember what I remember as fact from reading biographical material because Swan Song is so believable, credible and possible. I can just hear him talking to limousine drivers and neighbours just the way that he does in this novel.
The narrator is nothing short of gifted! She perfectly switches from telling the story, the collective voice of the lamentation of Swans, the individual and Truman himself. Her portrayal of Truman is eerily perfect. This is one of those books that makes the perfect audiobook thanks to Deborah Weston’s dramatic background. Reading the hard copy I thought that it would make a great film adaption. Now that I have heard it told, I can certainly say it was made for audio!

A drag, couldn’t get through it

The start of the first chapter was very promising and then it quickly went downhill. Repetitive, whining, without any story line. I wish I could return the book and get my credit back. Struggled through 7 chapters in hopes it will get better, no luck there.