Helena Bonham Carter to read audiobook of Holly Dawson’s memoir All of Us Atoms
Helena Bonham Carter will narrate the audiobook of All of Us Atoms (Canongate), Holly Dawson’s memoir. The audiobook will be published on 30 October 2025. The hardback and e-book were published on 8 May 2025, and the paperback will be published in May 2026.
Faced with the prospect of losing her memory, a writer revisits the moments that changed her – from childhood to motherhood, loss and ill-health. Through shifting pronouns and perspectives, moving across place and time, each piece twists the kaleidoscope of existence to make sense of the present through the past. From the opening battle between her brain and her body, a conversation emerges between her collection of selves: the Daughter, the Sister, the Dancer, the Gardener, the Mother, the Girl-Who-Read-Woolf. Reliving her journey of becoming, she unpicks the fabric of fact and experience to stitch a new tapestry of personhood, both real and imaginary, mundane and profound.
All of Us Atoms offers a tender portrait of the tension between our drive to make sense of things and the freedom that comes from throwing categories away. It heralds the arrival of a major new literary voice, urging us to reframe and reclaim our own stories and revel in our mutable, messy, multitudinous selves.
Holly Dawson will be speaking about All Of Us Atoms at the London Literature Festival this Saturday 1st November with Thea Lenarduzzi, in a conversation chaired by Lucia Osborne-Crowley.
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Helena Bonham Carter commented: ‘All of us Atoms so springs off the page; Holly writes with such vividness and intimacy. She is a genius, that’s why I wanted to read the audiobook. It was an immediate reaction when I read the first sentence, and then I couldn’t stop till I read the last. Reading All of Us Atoms made me a better person. Holly Dawson deserves to be read by everyone, and should be, for their own benefit. Certainly every woman.’
On the audiobook publication, Holly Dawson said: ‘I’m so thrilled that Helena is reading the audiobook of All Of Us Atoms - I can't imagine anyone more perfectly suited. And I’m so grateful to the whole Canongate family for embracing the playful ambiguity of the book, and for sharing my belief that we all need to find ways to make sense and meaning out of this bewildering, messy world.’
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Holly Dawson is a writer, editor and teacher. Since 2018, she has been Reader-in-Residence at Charleston, where she gets to indulge her passion for Modernist literature and Virginia Woolf. Her plays, drawing on Bloomsbury diaries and letters, have been performed by actors including Helena Bonham Carter, Miranda Richardson and Jonathan Pryce. Having grown up in Cornwall, she now lives in rural Sussex with far too many hens.
@hollyjdawson | hollyjdawson.com
Helena Bonham Carter author photo copyright Matt Crockett