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Title: Beyond the City

Author: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Narrator: Shelly Frasier

Format: Unabridged

Length: 3 hrs and 49 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-24-01

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 7 votes

Genres: Classics, British Literature

Publisher's Summary:

Destiny brings three peculiar households together in the placid English countryside. The desire for money and romance drive these Victorians beyond the natural boundaries of their middle-class lives. As the web of lust and deceit draws these accidental neighbors ever closer, a financial scandal befalls one of them. An outside "rank pirate" is linked somehow to one of the neighbors. Who could it be? In this work, Conan Doyle exhibits the practiced subtlety and complexity for which he has become so well known.

©2000 Tantor Media Incorporated

Members Reviews:

Amusing but not groundbreaking

This 1893 novella from the creator of Sherlock Holmes is a reminder that Arthur Conan Doyle was a productive writer across many decades, who worked in genres other than detective fiction. This is a lightweight social comedy, easily read in a couple of hours. It really does not have quite enough going for it to attain classic status--Diary of a Nobody by the Grossmith brothers runs circles around it in wit, invention, style and what it divulges about Late Victorian middle class suburban society.

This is the story of four families that live in a new subdivision of the McMansion counterpart of suburban London in the 1890s. There are the elderly spinster sisters, stalwarts of Victorian manners, out of whose family land the subdivision was created; a widower doctor and his two marriageable daughters; a recently retired naval admiral, his wife and adult son; and another young man and his aunt, an attractive woman of a certain age, who stridently advocates suffrage, who is an adventurer and popular lecturer. There ensues some couplings--the daughters and the son and nephew and the doctor and the aunt, but then there are the necessary complications to true love. Two of the three couplings will survive, but all end up happy. The sisters provide amusing perspective of the goings on. Masterpiece Classic could take this and with the right cast and stylish approach make a winsome production.

This edition is print on demand. The cover is thick, glossy photo stock, the back cover has a minimal description, and the interior is laid out competently (not all PODs are, believe me) but is minimal, with no critical introduction to put this in context.

"Tragi-Comedy of Life Played Out in Three Suburban Villas"

âBeyond the Cityâ is a pleasant little piece of light reading. Too long to be a short story, yet too short to be called a novel, I am reluctant to call it a ânovella.â It is more like a drawing room play in narrative form, except that the setting is three recently built and newly purchased up-scale villas in Norwood, a developing suburb south of London. The time period is the 1890s. The setting of the three villas and a commonly-shared tennis court is called âThe Wildernessâ by the real estate developer. Villa #1 is occupied by retired 65-years-old Admiral Hay Denver, his wife of many years, and their adult son, Harold, who works from morning to night in the city on the stock exchange. Villa #2 is occupied by semi-retired 52-year-old Doctor Balthazar Walker, a widower who has come into a considerable inheritance from a grateful patient and prefers scientific research to routine medical practice; his household is completed by his two young daughters, Clara and Ida, both of marriageable age, and a housekeeper. As the story opens, the new owner is moving into Villa #3.