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A Place of Greater Safety
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 52 mins
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He has no money, no reputation and no famous ancestors.' The love story of the Emperor Vespasian, who brought peace to Rome after years of strife, and his mistress, the freed slave woman Caenis, this book recreates Ancient Rome's most turbulent period - the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero and Vespasian's rise to power. As their forbidden romance blossoms, Caenis is embroiled in political intrigue, while Vespasian embarks on a glorious career.
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Great love story
- By Julie on 05-04-20
By: Lindsey Davis
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Resurrection
- By: Leo Tolstoy
- Narrated by: Alastair Cameron
- Length: 16 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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In Tolstoy's final novel, a privileged nobleman by the name of Dmitri Nekhlyudov seeks to make amends for a bad deed he committed in the past. In the process, he discovers that he has been living in a world far removed from the reality of the average person.
By: Leo Tolstoy
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The Fountainhead
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: Christopher Hurt
- Length: 32 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the 20th century's most challenging novels of ideas, The Fountainhead champions the cause of individualism through the story of a gifted young architect who defies the tyranny of conventional public opinion. The struggle for personal integrity in a world that values conformity above creativity is powerfully illustrated through three characters: Howard Roarke, a genius; Gail Wynand, a newspaper mogul and self-made millionaire; and Dominique Francon, a devastating beauty.
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The Fountainhead
- By Zachary on 06-04-10
By: Ayn Rand
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The Idiot
- By: Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 27 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin possesses a childlike innocence and trusting nature that leave him vulnerable to abuse by those around him. Returning to St. Petersburg to collect an inheritance, Myshkin realizes he is a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, manipulation and power.
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Avoid Constance Garnett
- By Anthony on 04-09-17
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Golden Earrings
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Catalina, grand-daughter of Spanish refugees, is a disciplined student with the School of the Paris Opera Ballet. Little gets inthe way of her career until the visit of an otherworldly being, who leaves her a mysterious pair of golden earrings. Given a quest, Catalina realises she must explore her own Spanish heritage and makes the connection between the visitor and ‘La Rusa’, a young Andalusian flamenco star. La Rusa died in exile in Paris in 1952, her death ruled as suicide. But as Catalina begins to discover, there were those in the community, who had good reason for wanting La Rusa dead.
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Fabulous story
- By Paddington on 10-19-12
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Instruments of Darkness
- A Novel
- By: Imogen Robertson
- Narrated by: Wanda McCaddon
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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In the year 1780, Harriet Westerman, the willful mistress of a country manor in Sussex, finds a dead man on her grounds with a ring bearing the crest of Thornleigh Hall in his pocket. Not one to be bound by convention or to shy away from adventure, she recruits a reclusive local anatomist named Gabriel Crowther to help her find the murderer, and historical suspense's newest investigative duo is born.
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Not The Best, But Not Too Bad...
- By MJ on 01-13-13
By: Imogen Robertson
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Madame Tussaud
- A Novel of the French Revolution
- By: Michelle Moran
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Marie Tussaud has learned the secrets of wax sculpting by working alongside her uncle in their celebrated wax museum, the Salon de Cire. From her popular model of the American ambassador Thomas Jefferson to her tableau of the royal family at dinner, Marie's museum provides Parisians with the very latest news on fashion, gossip, even politics. Her customers hail from every walk of life, and word even arrives that the royals themselves are coming to see their likenesses....
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Tales from a turbulent time
- By Tim on 07-23-12
By: Michelle Moran
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The Forsyte Chronicles, Vol. 2
- A Modern Comedy
- By: John Galsworthy
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 34 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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John Galsworthy's magnificent trilogy of power and passion chronicles the wealthy Forsyte family. The complete Chronicles are divided into three volumes, containing nine books and four interludes in total. Volume 2, A Modern Comedy, focuses on Soames's vivacious daughter, Fleur. Soames tries constantly to protect her but is baffled by the carefree attitudes in post-war London. Fleur and her husband Michael Mont host society gatherings, but her previous affair with Jon Forsyte leaves embers of a passion that are ready to ignite - with dreadful consequences.
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Very worthwhile
- By Jonathan Kalkstein on 09-27-22
By: John Galsworthy
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Tremontaine, Season One
- 13 Book Series, Box Set
- By: Ellen Kushner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, and others
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren, Nick Sullivan, Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 22 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In a city that never was, sex, scandal, and swordplay combine in a melodrama of manners that takes listeners to a world inspired by Elizabethan London, 18th century Paris, and 1980s New York City. Sexuality is fluid, politics is everything, and outcasts are the tastemakers. Intrigue is afoot when a Duchess, a scholar, a swordswoman, and a genius, are brought together by long-buried lies and truths that cannot be denied.
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Wonderful story, flawed narration
- By Kristin on 05-25-18
By: Ellen Kushner, and others
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In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.
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Brilliant, terrifying, relevant
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When Frances Shore joins her engineer husband in Jeddah, she is warned not to ask questions. But bored, she begins to speculate about her neighbors and the empty flat above her. At first she believes the flat is being used as a lover's tryst - then she suspects something more sinister.
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Vintage Mantel, ahead of its time
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In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.
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Ten years have passed since Muriel Axon was locked away for society's protection, but psychiatric confinement has only increased her malice and ingenuity. At last free, she sets into motion an intricate plan to exact revenge on those who had her put away. Her former social worker, Isabel, and her old neighbors have moved on, but Muriel, with her talent for disguise, will infiltrate their homes and manipulate their lives, until all her enemies are brought together for a gruesome finale.
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Strange
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Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black and More
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One of the 21st century's most celebrated authors, Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice: for 2009's Wolf Hall, the first in her phenomenally successful Thomas Cromwell trilogy, and its 2012 sequel Bring Up the Bodies. The third novel in the series, 2020's The Mirror and the Light, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. This collection includes three of her best works of contemporary fiction, ranging from the Gothic to the blackly comic.
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Finally made it to the end
- By anonymous on 10-06-23
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Every Day Is Mother's Day
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Evelyn Axona is a medium by trade; her daughter, Muriel, is a half-wit by nature. Barricaded in their crumbling house, surrounded by the festering rubbish of years, they defy the curiosity of their neighbors and their social worker, Isabel Field. Isabel is young and inexperienced and has troubles of her own: an elderly father who wanders the streets, and a lover, Colin, who wants her to run away with him. But Colin has three horrible children and a shrill wife who is pregnant again - how is he going to run anywhere?
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good and weird
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Citizens
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From one of the truly preeminent historians of our time, this is a landmark book chronicling the French Revolution. Simon Schama deftly refutes the contemporary notion that the French Revolution represented an uprising of the oppressed poor against a decadent aristocracy and corrupt court. He argues instead that the revolution was born of a rift among the elite over the speed of progress toward modernity and science, social and economic change.
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Audio Skips!!
- By Joseph M. Arnold on 07-02-15
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The Reign of Terror continues to fascinate scholars as one of the bloodiest periods in French history, when the Committee of Public Safety strove to defend the first Republic from its many enemies, creating a climate of fear and suspicion in revolutionary France. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.
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A Warning
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One of the most accomplished, acclaimed, and garlanded writers, Hilary Mantel delivers a brilliant collection of contemporary stories. Cutting to the core of human experience, Mantel brutally and acutely writes about marriage, class, family, and sex. Unpredictable, diverse, and sometimes shocking, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher displays a magnificent writer at the peak of her powers.
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Superhuman Prose that Defies Gravity
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Thomas Cromwell
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Thomas Cromwell has long been reviled as a Machiavellian schemer who stopped at nothing in his quest for power. As Henry VIII's right-hand man, Cromwell was the architect of the English Reformation, secured Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and plotted the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and upon his arrest, was accused of trying to usurp the King himself. But here Tracy Borman reveals a different side of one of the most notorious figures in history.
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narration is very well done & book is quite good
- By horoscopy on 02-18-15
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Little
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In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling....
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Little is a Treat
- By B. Parker-Knowles on 01-18-19
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The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution
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Between 1793 and 1794, thousands of French citizens were imprisoned and hundreds sent to the guillotine by a powerful dictatorship that claimed to be acting in the public interest. Only a few years earlier, revolutionaries had proclaimed a new era of tolerance, equal justice, and human rights. How and why did the French Revolution's lofty ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity descend into violence and terror?
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Terrible Accent
- By john on 06-15-21
By: Timothy Tackett
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Dominion
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1952. Twelve years have passed since Churchill lost to the appeasers and Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany. The global economy strains against the weight of the long German war against Russia still raging in the east. The British people find themselves under increasingly authoritarian rule - the press, radio, and television tightly controlled, the British Jews facing ever greater constraints.
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Weak Tale Marred by Bias & Prejudice
- By Bill on 09-15-14
By: C.J. Sansom
What listeners say about A Place of Greater Safety
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Frank Dudley Berry Jr.
- 08-01-13
Disaster
This is the first Audible.com book I have experienced (out of several dozeb, possibly a hundred or more) that failed completely. The reason is the narrator's performance, in particular, his indifference to the basic 'grammar' of the author. Let me explain.
Hilary Mantel develops her narration in the form of vignettes, switching from character to character abruptly, and also interspersing commentary and anecdote about other historicual figures. In the printed text, these are separated by a few end-stops, sufficient white space for the reader to know when one episode ends, another begins.
For reasons best known to himself or his director, Mr. Keeble has chosen to ignore these grammatical indicators. He reads the text seamlessly without pause or break, disregarding these endstops. Evidently, empty air is so frightening it's intolerable. Thus, the listener has dialog and action from one scene melded onto the one before, without any idea of whether he is still in the same scene, or another, or hearing a larger comment. The result is that detail becomes impossible to separate or recollect. After five hours of this, I gave up, opened the text, and began reading (which I also do) a really good novel, that is quite easily approachable if you have the common sense to respect the author's intent.
Added to that is the narrator's complete inability to give any of the three main characters (Des Moulin, Robespierre, and Danton) really individual characterization, and you have a disaster.
I am going to be seeking a refund on this one. If you decide to buy it, you have ample warning.
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97 people found this helpful
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- J.
- 06-30-14
"Historical" diatribes posing as a novel.
The French Revolution is a great backdrop for a novel, just ask Mr Dickens. Mantel should be commended for attempting to be true to history in her copious use of letters and documents of key figures in order to give them an authentic voice when it comes to dialogue. The problem is that most of this book is just dialogue and precious little explanation as to what the hell is going on. I'm a professional historian myself and yet I had difficulty wading through the didactic exchanges of these revolutionaries in order to piece out where we were in the evolution of the Revolution. Even more problematic, in Mantel's effort to rely on writings of these figures in order to put words in their mouths, she forgot that a novel needs a plot. The only satisfaction the reader gets out of this long and dreary piece is seeing everyone get it in the neck. --- Oh, don't accuse me of being a spoiler, you know what happened to these guys, right?
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28 people found this helpful
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- redfox
- 11-18-14
Live the Revolution -- the glory and the decline
Would you listen to A Place of Greater Safety again? Why?
Yes, and I probably will, as there's always so much going on that you can't catch it all.
What other book might you compare A Place of Greater Safety to and why?
Mantel's other books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
What about Jonathan Keeble’s performance did you like?
Some very memorable voices for some of the characters. (Took a while for me to sort them out, especially early on, but over time it helped me remember which storyline we were in.)
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Lots of laughs at particularly witty cutting lines. Many might be from the subjects themselves, but I'm sure Mantel wrote more than a few.
Any additional comments?
All of Mantel's books have a high barrier to entry, because they start with a lot of characters and a kaliedoscope of events and time passage, but it builds, accretes, and suddenly you're enmeshed in and aware of historical events from the ground floor. Recommend the recordings, as it might be easy to lay the books aside during early confusion, but you can just let it wash over you with audio...
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7 people found this helpful
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- Marcia
- 01-02-14
Enlightening and worthwhile.
Once again Mantel offers an interesting perspective on a tumultuous time in history. Perhaps a bit drawn out and rushed in the end but definitely worth the time. The narrator is excellent and in no way detracts from the story. I wouldn't have finished the book in print (knowing how it must end) however Keeble's performance made it enjoyable and easy to follow. Not to be missed if you have an interest in this era or enjoy Hilary Mantel's other books!
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6 people found this helpful
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- Syd Young
- 12-09-13
A Labor of Love
The last half of this book drug and was challenging to follow, until the very end. I can see how Hilary Mantel has really grown as an author, but the magic dialogue and characterization are definitely pure Hilary Mantel and make it worth the labor. I thought I knew a lot about the French Revolution, but I didn't know much about Danton and Camille. These characters were so alive they were practically there in front of me. (What loud lawyer does Mantel live with?) The ending -you know what is coming - was superb.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Sarah FitzGerald
- 10-20-13
Oh so long
Don't get me wrong I love reading dorrstops, but this book is interminable. The last 1/4 would stand on it's own and is the only part with interest.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Lucy
- 10-12-18
Totally, Utterly, Brilliant
Everything about this is Just Plain As Good As It Gets.
I used to think Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies were Mantel at her best - which is amazing. Now, I'm not so sure. This is incredible as a novel. As an historical novel, it is superlative. The writing is beyond good. Making sense of the French Revolution, especially The Terror, is Not Easy. But, not only does Mantel do that, she also manages to produce an extraordinary novel on its own merits - and one that is completely relevant for today, or any day.
I read this, a few years ago, and loved it. Then I bought the audio version to listen to on a trip to France. And actually, I think it's even better. The narration is fabulous. A total pleasure to listen to, and , for my money, it actually enhanced the book. Which is rare. Spend a credit on this. You won't be sorry.
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- Sarah Kurasz
- 07-09-19
Makes the French Revolution Human
This is another beautiful book by Hilary Mantel and it's every bit as good as her other books. It follows the lives of three of the main revolutionaries and the all too tragic course of the French revolution. I love this book. In fact, it's one of my favorites. I've had a morbid fascination with the French Revolution since i first learned about it in the 3rd grade. It only continued when I covered it again in high school. This book took my interest from a terrible, if humanless, tragedy to a story about people with dreams and hopes that went terribly wrong.
I first heard of it as a suggestion on the podcast Revolutions and than read it twice. The thing is, listening to it on audible brought it to another level of beautiful. Hilary Mantel has a beautiful way with words and Jonathan Keeble did a wonderful job narrating it. The characters all had distinct voices and I found it easy to keep track of who was speaking even without being told.
This book is wonderful for people interested in the French Revolution, lovers of Hilary Mantel's other works, or people who love beautiful prose and more literary Historical fiction.
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- Laura
- 05-21-15
Wonderful characterization
What made the experience of listening to A Place of Greater Safety the most enjoyable?
The characterizations. I am familiar with Mantel's talents in this area from Wolf Hall, and I can see now that she had developed her skills early on. Most of us are familiar with the history of the French Revolution and the rise of the Terror. But how it was experienced and lived is hard to capture, but Mantel does that in this fictionalized, yet historically solid, account.
Who was your favorite character and why?
He's not on stage long, but Mirabeau.
What about Jonathan Keeble’s performance did you like?
I thought it was fine. He had a lot of characters to portray. He did Camille Desmoulins best of all.
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- Jeremy Mumford
- 05-30-21
Less a novel
than an attempt to encompass the whole history of the Revolution in the love triangle of three men. It’s wonderful, and never boring, but is a bit exhausting.
The narrator goes in for voices. Working class characters have cockney accents, which is a bit odd but gets the point across. He gives some of the women shrill and unpleasant accents which is too bad and ruins some passages. His voice for Camille has the stutter which Mantel refers to but does not indicate directly in his speech. At first, I found that hard to listen to, but over time it became my favorite part of the performance.
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