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Title: A Man of His Time

Subtitle: Inheritance Trilogy, Book 3

Author: Phyllis Bentley

Narrator: Rupert Degas

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-13-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

A Man of His Time continues the chronicles of the Oldroyd and Morcar families, which began with Inheritance and The Rise of Henry Morcar, to complete an unforgettable trilogy of the West Riding. The years of change from 1958 to 1965 present Henry Morcar with the severest challenges and trickiest assignments of his life as he surmounts successive disasters only to find his lifes work threatened. A Man of his Time is a story of conflict between age and youth, between Morcar and the younger generation around him. These descendants of Oldroyds, Bamforths, Morcars, and Mellors are real and living, linked to the past but vibrantly imagined in their own time.

Phyllis Bentley (1894-1977) published her first work in 1918, a collection of short stories entitled The World's Bane, after which she published several poor-selling novels. The publication in March 1932 of her best-known work, Inheritance, set against the background of the development of the textile industry in the West Riding, received widespread critical acclaim and ran through 23 impressions by 1946, making her the first successful English regional novelist since Thomas Hardy and his Wessex. In 1949 she was awarded an honorary DLitt from Leeds University; in 1958 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and in 1970 was awarded an OBE.

Members Reviews:

Lovely to hear, but why no Inheritance?

Any additional comments?

I have always loved Phyllis Bentley's Inheritance trilogy, which has an addition in Ring in the New. Great that this is now available, but why only this one and Ring in the New? It doesn't stand so well alone, you do need Inheritance and The Rise of Henry Morcar, hence my lower score overall. The narrator's voice is good, fits it well, so please please beg and plead with whoever holds the rights to the earlier books to let him record these as well. Granada TV decided in their wisdom to destroy the tapes of the excellent television adaptation with the young John Thaw, James Bolam and David Burke as Henry Morcar. An audiobook can never replace that but it would be a start. And for continuity, please keep the narrator? OK, that's a lot to ask for, but if you don't ask...

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Title: Man Overboard

Author: Monica Dickens

Narrator: Sandro Monetti

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-13-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Lieutenant-Commander, the hero of this novel, is axed from the Navy at the age of 36, one of many thousands obliged to re-plan their lives as the result of cuts in the armed services. A widower with a small daughter, he has no experience or knowledge outside submarines and the Royal Navy. His whole life had been that of a sailor since he joined up direct from school at the beginning of the war. This is not only the story of his struggles and adventures when he tries to find some way of earning his living; it is the story of his difficulty in adjusting himself to an unfamiliar civilian world. Monica Dickens's novel is the story of all such men in any of the services who find themselves so rudely thrust into the ordinary life of their country which, though they have served unselfishly, they find they are ill-equipped to live in. Written with the lighter humorous touch of some of her earlier books, it is a sympathetic presentation of the human side of one of those mass adjustments forced on society by the changing nature of the world and its affairs.

Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in - she was expelled from St Pauls Girls School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge - Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939. Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but the majority of writing continued to be set in Britain. Her book of 1953, No More Meadows, reflected her work with the NSPCC and she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of childrens books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals, and to some extent children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.

Members Reviews:

Excrutiating

What would have made Man Overboard better?

Monica Dickens's books are usually enjoyable - light, funny, often moving. Man Overboard was quite simply dreadful. I couldn't engage with any of the characters and found the story quite pointless. And the narration was, quite simply, dreadful - more suited to a Famous Five story than a theoretically adult book. The wrong words were inflected in the reading, many were mispronounced, the "females" sounded like John Cleese playing a woman, and the whole thing was delivered in a breathless rush. A sad disappointment.

Dickens at Her Best.

Would you listen to Man Overboard again? Why?

After finishing reading this I immediately read it again. I didn't want to lose the characters

who had become my friends. It is years since I last read a Monica Dickens novel and I had forgotten how great she was, This story is vastly entertaining, amusing and yet serious.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Man Overboard?

Ben learning how to become a 'demon salesman'

What about Sandro Monettis performance did you like?

Performance was very good.

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Title: A Modern Tragedy

Author: Phyllis Bentley

Narrator: Joe Knezevich

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-13-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

The moors and valleys of Miss Bentley's Native Yorkshire and the mill town of Hudley, just a few miles away from the Ire Valley of her novel Inheritance, form the scene of this new audiobook. A Modern Tragedy is the dramatic story of Walter Haigh, who makes his entrance as an enthusiastic, ambitious, rather innocent young fellow, starting in the textile business with his father's old employers, the Lumbs, at Valley Mill.

Early in the story, Walter leaves Valley Mill and takes a position with the wily Leonard Tasker, of Victory Mills. He becomes apparently prosperous, makes his way into the more aristocratic society of the town, and falls in love with beautiful Elaine Crosland. Until the depression pulls down Tasker's business, and everything changes...

Members Reviews:

Phyllis Bentley is a great new find!

A story about a family in the north of England in the early twentieth century. The narrative is compelling, the characters well-drawn and empathetic. An enjoyable read.

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Title: Take Courage

Author: Phyllis Bentley

Narrator: Angèle Masters

Format: Unabridged

Length: 18 hrs and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-13-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

A note from the author: "All the characters in this novel are real people, revived from the pages of Yorkshire history to enact again their significant drama of love and strife, human strength and human weakness. If I have sometimes deepened the lines, and supplied the gaps, of this story of England's Civil War, from my own invention, that is the novelist's privilege: to create a symbolic unity from scattered hints and dispersed incidents."

In this novel of the English Civil War, Phyllis Bentley brings her lightness of touch, and real human compassion, to one of the darkest periods of English History.

Phyllis Bentley, 1894 - 1977 Bentley published her first work in 1918, a collection of short stories entitled The World's Bane, after which she published several poor-selling novels. The publication in March 1932 of her best-known work, Inheritance, set against the background of the development of the textile industry in the West Riding, received widespread critical acclaim and ran through twenty-three impressions by 1946, making her the first successful English regional novelist since Thomas Hardy and his Wessex. In 1949 she was awarded an honorary DLitt from Leeds University; in 1958 she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; and in 1970 was awarded an OBE.

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Title: Ceremonies of Innocence

Author: Annie Bullen

Narrator: Helen Stern

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-10-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

After 19 years of a loveless marriage, Angela Cruickshank's patience is exhausted at long last as she returns from France. Inevitably she goes to stay with her old friends Clem and Kattie - Kattie who catches people as other people catch colds, collector of strays and lame ducks, and who somehow fits into her big rambling house on the Downs.

Kattie has other guests, of course - Hugh Hansard, a talented but disorganized composer whose wife has just left him, as well as Fergus Slack, not long out of a short stretch in Dartmoor, ex-dope dealer and practised layabout looking for his next move. To add to the mixture is Kattie's beautiful yet mythomaniac daughter Dorelia, home from her Swiss boarding school. The comic accidents of Kattie's random household give rise to more sinister events as Angela's husband comes to claim her while Fergus, pursued by the local police, takes off with Dorelia as his hostage. The action is fast and funny, and Annie Bullen has a sharp ear for the accents of English country life in the 1980s.

Annie Bullen was born in Hampshire and still lives there with her two children. She works as a journalist and Air and Angels is her first novel.

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Title: Air and Angels

Author: Annie Bullen

Narrator: Helen Stern

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-10-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

London to become a swan after stunning her family with a playful appearance as a newspaper model girl when she was only 17. Petra's own attempts to make a life seem always to have left her on the fringe of things, confused and used. A conventional marriage removed her from her family, but only to recreate the choking domesticity of her childhood.

Petra is forced to re-examine her relationship with her glamorous sister, discovering how little she knows about Caroline and the cracks on the surface that betrayed the greater fissures in what had seemed to be a carefree jet-setting life.

Counterpointing Petra's memories are the utterly different views and recollections of her elderly neighbour Frederic, a refugee from Nazi Germany, and a man whose gentle simplicity conceals a macabre secret. Annie Bullen deftly captures the atmosphere of the superficially prosperous but emotionally starved Appleton family, whose daughters have so much more in common than they have ever supposed...

Annie Bullen was born in Hampshire and still lives there with her two children. She works as a journalist and Air and Angels is her first novel.

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Title: Snapper

Author: Brian Kimberling

Narrator: MacLeod Andrews

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-09-13

Publisher: Headline Digital

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

A birdwatcher's guide to the human heart - an unconventional coming of age story from an unforgettable new voice that will appeal to fans of David Vann and Annie Proulx.

Set in a brilliantly observed rural Indiana, 'the bastard son of the Midwest', Snapper is a book about birdwatching, a woman who won't stay true, and a pickup truck that won't start. Here turtles eat alligators for breakfast, Klansmen skulk in the undergrowth, and truckers drop into the diner of a town named Santa Claus to ensure that no child's Christmas letter goes unanswered, while Nathan grapples with the eternal question: Should I stay, or should I go?

Kimberling's vision of small-town life is as characterful as Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, but bristling with the tensions of race, class, poverty, and prejudice, it makes for a bracing listen.

Members Reviews:

Disappointing

The blurb for this sounded so good, but it was just so random and disjointed. You delved into chapters and just as you were getting somewhere, you were rudely shunted onto the next one - and don't get me started on the abrupt ending.

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Title: I Shall Not Want

Author: Norman Collins

Narrator: Tom McKay

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 46 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-03-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Set in Edwardian London, this is the absorbing story of the life-long conflict between the love and ambitions of unrepentant sinner John Marco.

Norman Richard Collins was born in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, on October 3, 1907. By the time he was nine years old, at the William Ellis School in Hampstead, he displayed a talent for both writing and publishing. In January 1933, when he was 25, he became assistant managing director in the publishing house run by Victor Gollancz. In 1941 Collins was forced to move to the BBC due to increasingly poor relationship with Gollancz, who resented Collins talent and saw him as a rival.

Collins wrote fourteen novels and one work of non-fiction in his lifetime, most of which were popular successes, published begrudgingly by Gollancz. Collins also became well known for his innovative programming at the British Broadcasting Corporation during the late 1940s, and later for advocating and leading the movement toward commercial television broadcasting in Great Britain.

An unmistakable mark of Collins power of application and creative energy was that he continued to write fiction throughout such a very busy working life. Although never a full-time writer he was a fluent and prolific author with 16 titles and two plays to his credit between 1934 and 1981. An autographed edition of twelve of his novels was published during the 1960s.

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Title: What Will Survive

Author: Joan Smith

Narrator: Eila Ulyett

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-02-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

July 1997: Lebanon makes a rare appearance in the British headlines when an English woman dies in a landmine accident near the town of Nebatiyeh. The dead woman is a minor celebrity, a model with an Egyptian mother visiting the Middle East for the first time. Reporters descend on her Somerset home, linking her death with Princess Diana's high-profile campaign for a ban on landmines. When a young feature writer is sent to Beirut to write a story about Aisha's death, she finds a city only just recovering from civil war and she suspects that Aisha was another one of its victim.

Critic Reviews:

"Smith's analyses are brilliant and unerring; that she also writeswith energy in an engaging style, is concise, never wasting a sentence,makes a fascinating book wonderful fun to read" (Marilyn French on Misogynies)

"This lively and intelligent book offers its bold challenge to theway things are at the end of the century" (Joan Bakewell on Different for Girls)

"We ought to pay attention to Smith's unsettling accuracy" (Lisa Jardine, The Times)

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Title: And When She Was Good

Author: Laura Lippman

Narrator: Anne Wittman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-02-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 2 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

In the comfortable suburb where she lives, Heloise is just a mom, the youngish widow with a forgettable job who somehow never misses her son's soccer games or school plays. But in discrete hotel rooms throughout the area, she's the woman of your dreams - if you can afford her hourly fee.

For more than a decade, Heloise has believed her unorthodox life to be a safe one. But now this secret life is under siege. And nearby another so-called 'suburban madam' has been found dead in her car, an apparent suicide...

Can Heloise stay alive long enough to remake her life again? Can she really expect to leave everything else behind?

Members Reviews:

Great stand alone thriller

I really enjoyed the subject or this novel and was completely absorbed from chapter 2. I was just slightly disappointed by the ending...it was a little predictable. Still, a great listen.