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Title: The Hidden People

Author: Alison Littlewood

Narrator: Paul McLaughlin

Format: Unabridged

Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-06-16

Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books

Ratings: 1.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Suspense

Publisher's Summary:

The best-selling author of Richard & Judy Book Club hit The Cold Season returns with a chilling mystery where superstition and myth bleed into real life with tragic consequences.

Pretty Lizzie Higgs is gone, burned to death on her own hearth - but was she really a changeling, as her husband insists?

Albie Mirralls met his cousin only once, in 1851, within the grand glass arches of the Crystal Palace. But unable to countenance the rumours that surround her murder, he leaves his young wife in London and travels to Halfoak, a village steeped in superstition.

Albie begins to look into Lizzie's death, but in this place where the old tales hold sway and the Hidden People supposedly roam, answers are slippery, and further tragedy is just a step away.

Critic Reviews:

"This is an intriguing and unsettling scenario. Littlewood's descriptions are picturesque and her prose convincingly dated and beautifully lyrical." (Sunday Express)

Members Reviews:

Disappointed

The story held promise initially, but overall it was slow, not believable and tedious. I found it difficult to slog through.

Great book, terrible narration and production

I should say first that this is a great novel. It deals ambiguously and sensibly with folklore and fairy belief and sets up a very plausible and fascinating period backdrop. It's compelling, interesting and poetic and it keeps the reader guessing. However my heart goes out to Alison Littlewood as her brilliant book has been savaged by the most ham fisted and lazy audio prouduction I've ever heard.

I don't believe the blame lies entirely with Paul McLaughlin, who is clearly not a British English speaker and turns in a fairly convincing accent (for the most part). However his slips in pronunciation go far beyond transatlantic differences. The producer demonstrates his or her incompetence from the start by allowing the narrator to open with a quote from W B "Yeeets". This sets he tone for what is to come, not enough to spoil the story entirely you might think. But then come the Yorkshire dialect sections.

Now at one point during the recording of this you would think that the actor or producer would have said, "Hey should we maybe take a listen to a recording of some Yorkshire people talking". Instead they insult listeners from all over the world by assuming they won't know the difference and opt for a kind of demented middle earth approximation of what they think a Yorkshire accent would probably sound like.

One of the great strengths of Littlewoods book is her use of real folk song in the story and its parallels and hints to the narrative that unfolds. Again you might expect an audio producer to direct an actor who had no knowledge of English folk song to simply speak the verse sections, or perhaps spend a little bit of time listening to some recordings if only to get a feel for traditional English song. Not a chance ! The voice actor instead seems to have been encouraged to guess at the sound of these songs by imagining a world where music had not yet been invented. If I'm wrong about Paul McLaughlin and he is in fact a native British English speaker then... well... Wow.

I don't mean to savage the voice artist here, I think he's been let down almost as much as the author. It's the producer who is simply not up to the job.