9780063030862
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Sea State audiobook

  • By: Tabitha Lasley
  • Narrator: Billie Fulford-Brown
  • Category: Social Classes, Social Science
  • Length: 6 hours 27 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: December 07, 2021
  • Language: English
  • (748 ratings)
(748 ratings)
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Sea State Audiobook Summary

A Recommended Read from: Vogue * USA Today * The Los Angeles Times * Publishers Weekly * The Week * Alma * Lit Hub

A stunning and brutally honest memoir that shines a light on what happens when female desire conflicts with a culture of masculinity in crisis

In her midthirties and newly free from a terrible relationship, Tabitha Lasley quit her job at a London magazine, packed her bags, and poured her savings into a six-month lease on an apartment in Aberdeen, Scotland. She decided to make good on a long-deferred idea for a book about oil rigs and the men who work on them. Why oil rigs? She wanted to see what men were like with no women around.

In Aberdeen, Tabitha became deeply entrenched in the world of roughnecks, a teeming subculture rich with brawls, hard labor, and competition. The longer she stayed, the more she found her presence had a destabilizing effect on the men–and her.

Sea State is on the one hand a portrait of an overlooked industry: “offshore” is a way of life for generations of primarily working-class men and also a potent metaphor for those parts of life we keep at bay–class, masculinity, the transactions of desire, and the awful slipperiness of a ladder that could, if we tried hard enough, lead us to security.

Sea State is on the other hand the story of a journalist whose professional distance from her subject becomes perilously thin. In Aberdeen, Tabitha gets high and dances with abandon, reliving her youth, when the music was good and the boys were bad. Twenty years on, there is Caden: a married rig worker who spends three weeks on and three weeks off. Alone and in an increasingly precarious state, Tabitha dives into their growing attraction. The relationship, reckless and explosive, will lay them both bare.

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Sea State Audiobook Narrator

Billie Fulford-Brown is the narrator of Sea State audiobook that was written by Tabitha Lasley

Tabitha Lasley was a journalist for ten years. She has lived in London, Johannesburg, and Aberdeen. This is her first book.

About the Author(s) of Sea State

Tabitha Lasley is the author of Sea State

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Sea State Full Details

Narrator Billie Fulford-Brown
Length 6 hours 27 minutes
Author Tabitha Lasley
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date December 07, 2021
ISBN 9780063030862

Subjects

The publisher of the Sea State is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Social Classes, Social Science

Additional info

The publisher of the Sea State is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780063030862.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Hank

February 19, 2022

I'm a little tardy, but apparently it's my job to rescue this book from some of the crappy reviews you all have been leaving here. You're all wrong! (Haha.) "Sea State" is beautifully written, utterly unpredictable, and, yes, you were right about one thing: not at all the book it set out to be. It breaks just about every rule of journalism out there (except for an allegiance to painful truth) and unfortunately verifies a terrible trope (usually seen in movies or TV series), you know the one, about a female reporter having a sexual relationship with a source. I'm not mad, though. Some readers here are miffed that "Sea State" is not an embedded narrative about what it's like to work on offshore rigs in the North Sea. (News flash: It sucks.) As Tabitha Lasley makes very clear in the beginning, THAT book was almost finished, in her stolen laptop, never to return. So let it go! That tragedy (and truly, the idea of losing a manuscript, and its backup copy, is enough to make me nauseous) luckily led to THIS book -- something so much more unique, searching, sad, sordid and penetratingly observant about masculinity, the modern economy and working class of the Brexit era, brought forth in a memoir of a misbegotten affair. Halfway through I started calling her Bridget Joans Didion.I loved it. So there.

Sarah

February 09, 2021

A debut from a former journalist who writes with poetic precision. The book couples keen observational journalistic skills (including transcripts from interviews) with lucid prose, so exact, the words are so carefully placed. Some reviews that I have read of this book focus on the moral element of the writer's choice to have an affair with a married man. If this were a novel, the choice of a writer to fictionalise an affair would not be criticised so this point, I believe, is moot. When I read, I don't read to make a moral judgement, I don't want to exist above the characters or the writers, looking down on them. Instead I want to experience things along with them; through their words, through what is shown to me rather than what is told to me. When I read 'Sea State' I could clearly feel things that Lasley wasn't explicitly telling me. It is very funny, sardonic even. Lasley is always the cleverest person in the room, she doesn't tell us this, it is patent. It is really sad. There is an pervasive notion of it being a last ditch attempt, after a life time of car crash relationships. Despite the bravado, the slut dress and fake feckles, Lasley says 'I was nobody's wife'. We are sure that she must have been able to see through Caden's vanity, his deceit and his platitudes, she as much as tells us so. It is not however a mystery why she throws everything in for this married rigger, the interwoven anecdotes and memories display to us that what has led to this. At the outset, we are told that the book was planned to be about men without women. We see this in a way that scratches the surface. It the way that they won't let a 'lass' buy a drink, that they pile into the rec room when a girl is wearing hot pants, that they can't talk to an attractive woman without trying to pull her. It is however only men with a herd mentality, only the 'Boro' lads on tour'; occasionally there are moments when there are break throughs in the interviews and a moment of crystal clarity presents itself but only in these isolated moments do we see how men are away from each other. To me, the book was about women. About the sorts of cultures you can get into or opt of out; the cultures of baby showers, dressing up for the races and constant self advertising. It was about Lasley herself, about the moments of varying degrees that turn us into the people that we are and lead us to accept any kinds of shit that are thrown at us. It is about all the women marketed 'like Camargue horses' with no prospects who will fight tooth and nail for a man who has no respect for them or for any women at all. It is about giving your daughter a posh name to give her chances. It is about not having your friends around. For me, the best part is Chapter 4, like a song with an extraordinary bridge, the middle part of the book absolutely sang. The writing about drug taking was glorious and the way it fitted in with a few perfectly pitched paragraphs about the scope of the city and it's vicinity to the Arctic Circle. This was what sold the book to me. After having read a few quotes in reviews, the construct of the prose and the particularity of the language, as if each word had been deliberated over. I had never really read anything about the rigs before and I devoured all of the data and the geeky facts about the rigs along with the social commentary relating the avarice of the oil industry. There was so much in this book that could at any given moment been unpacked further but was contained for the time being in just over 200 pages. Lasley keeps some of her cards close to her chest, I really can't wait to see what she writes next.

Gemma

May 21, 2021

Beautifully written and ever so slightly unnerving, this is definitely one of the most unique books I've read this year. Although it advertises itself as being about oil rigs and/or men without women present, it's not really about either of those things. It's much more about the societal expectations placed on both men and women, the very human price of capitalism, and how humans choose to engage with one another.

Joanna

December 30, 2021

obsessed ... completely disregards a conventional framework of (ethical) journalism and instead is a v messy account of sex, affairs, drugs, misogyny, and is about the author and her own life as much if not more than it is about the men who work offshore. and it also does actually offer a fascinating and unique perspective on the (dying?) culture of offshore rig workers. also the writing is very good - lucid, poetic, concise. everyone giving this 1* and moralising about the sexism / affair / lack of journalistic standards is boring and not hot

Duncan

March 05, 2022

Being on a rig sounds OK! Take a lot of books, podcasts, a Switch, hot water bottle, sounds alright. Having an affair though, jeepers. No thank you!

T

January 22, 2022

The author quits her job and moves to Aberdeen to interview oil rig workers. As a book of self-discovery and a type of now-or-never experience, it was captivating.

Caroline

May 21, 2022

I read most of this book in one sitting, I have goosebumps now

Sarah

October 10, 2021

A strange hybrid of memoir, primarily during the research period, interspersed with interviews and facts about the lives of offshore workers. I found the description of her affair and its aftermath the most impactful and interesting part of the book.

Judith

April 23, 2022

I really enjoyed this memoir by a journalist who captured the different aspects of the oil rig workers in the North Seas. She gave such vividly gloomy descriptions of the brutally hard life endured by these hearty men. She writes of the interviews she had with the individual workers, most of which were recorded on her phone during afternoon drinking bouts in seedy little bars in Aberdeen. And she filled in the blanks with facts and statistics about the big oil companies who own the oil rigs and how oblivious they are to safety issues until some disaster happens and then they rush to try to cover it up and buy good press. During the writing of the book she falls in love with one of the workers and thus adds a new perspective to the book. Most interesting and moving.

James

November 17, 2021

Thanks to Netgalley and Ecco for the ebook. After the end of a toxic relationship, Tabitha decides to quit her job at a London magazine and move to Aberdeen, Scotland, to finally write her book about men who work on offshore oil rigs. She dives in with interviews with the men who work the demanding shifts of three weeks on and three weeks off, as the spend there disposable income, drink and take drugs and tell stories about how hard the work is, but also how hard it is to acclimate when they get back home to their wives and kids. Tabitha throws herself into this world, even dating a married off shore worker that she expects more from than he can deliver. She gets emotionally twisted from her time there, but has this lovely book as a reward.

John

January 08, 2022

Based on the reviews, "Sea State" is a polarizing read. It appears that many were disappointed that the book only tangentially addressed the culture of working offshore on oil rigs in the North Sea, even though the title clearly states, "A Memoir," which meant -- to me at least -- that the book would be centered on the author's experiences.Lasley is such a masterful writer that I could not square her elegant prose with her trainwreck behavior she describes with ruthless precision. While her story is the center of the book, she touches upon so many issues worthy of deeper contemplation.One minor quibble, Lasley assumes that the reader is familiar with oil exploration in the North Sea and therefore refers to exploration platforms by their names without any context, which made the book difficult to follow in places.

Chelsea

January 22, 2022

Okay, so I really liked this book, but I agree with some of the other reviews that the description doesn’t align well with the substance of the book (I’m just not mad about it because I still really enjoyed it). Is this a book that has anything to do with offshore workers? Not really. It’s a book about a woman who undertakes a project to interview offshore workers about their experiences (the “what are men like when no women are around” quest that is subverted by her presence in it), and it’s about that experience for her and how it shapes her life for a time.And that story - told in an unflinchingly reflective style that manages to be occasionally poetic - is a good one.

Al

December 16, 2021

Very saucy and not really about men and their work. Delightful!

Laurel

April 11, 2021

Having read this the same week I read GHOSTS by Dolly Alderton, I got a little spooked that my life as a thirtysomething singleton was irrevocably doomed? But that is not the book's fault. I thought this really was great in the parts where the author is not rutting a married guy. Some folks might find that the compelling part of the story? All this is to say that I hope this book becomes a big hit because I want to know more about the author's scrapped memoir TRAINERS FOR PROPER DANCING.(for the ARC thx to netgalley and "I heard yr bitch still wears" ECCO publishing press.)

nomadreader (Carrie D-L)

January 02, 2022

4.5

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