Brat Farrar

By: Josephine Tey

Narrated by: Carole Boyd

Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

A stranger enters the inner sanctum of the Ashby family posing as Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family’s sizeable fortune. The stranger, Brat Farrar, has been carefully coached on Patrick’s mannerisms, appearance and every significant detail of Patrick’s early life, up to his 13th year when he disappeared and was thought to have drowned himself. It seems as if Brat is going to pull off this most incredible deception until old secrets emerge that threaten to jeopardise the imposter’s plan and his very life.

©1949 The National Trust (P)2014 Audible, Inc.

Great book

Very good book! I would highly recommend it! story,writing,and reader are all fabulous. if you enjoy mystery books with a happy ending you will love this book. it is beautifully written with a hint of humor.

Clarity of Mind

Perhaps because of her more modest output—eight novels, compared to Sayers’ twelve, Marsh’s thirty-two and Christie’s seventy-three—most of us don’t include Josephine Tey in the charmed inner circle of writers from the Golden Age of English Mystery. But she deserves a niche.

Her work stands apart from those other masters in more than mere tonnage. In the case of Brat Farrar, the very shape of the story came as something new. And I learned a lot about horses, too.

In many mysteries, you can almost sense the first big break and the final red herring. Admittedly, that’s part of the enjoyment; just as a song can sound incomplete without a bridge, a mystery without the chapter where all the leads have gone cold might disappoint.

But in Brat Farrar those cozy expectations are turned on their collective head. I can’t say any more without spoiling the story, so I’ll leave it to Peter Hitchens to sum up Tey’s virtues:

“Josephine Tey’s clarity of mind, and her loathing of fakes and of propaganda, are like pure, cold spring water in a weary land. Her story-telling ability is apparently effortless, and therefore you may be sure it was the fruit of great hard work. (As Ernest Hemingway said, ‘if it reads easy, that is because it was writ hard’.) But what she loves above all is to show that things are very often not what they seem to be, that we are too easily fooled, that ready acceptance of conventional wisdom is not just dangerous, but a result of laziness, incuriosity and of a resistance to reason.”

And, as if that wasn’t enough, our reader here, Carole Boyd, is simply superb. Her performance is as effortless as the prose she’s reading, and as spot-on as if she’d written the words herself.

A truly rich and engaging story

I read "Daughter of Time" many years ago, and it was great, but I quickly forgot about the author. Seeing this classic, about which I knew nothing, offered as a 2-for-1 sale, intrigued me, particularly after listening to Carole Boyd's narration sample. Now I am SO pleased to have listened to this book! It's a wonderful example of British Manor House life, toward the end of the era, and the not-so-stuffy gentry who live it. The narration is superb, the mystery is engaging and the dialogue in turns warm and acerbic. There is plenty of wit, the characters are clearly and cleanly fleshed-out, and the writing is simply as good as it gets.

Abrupt ending

I really enjoyed this story and all the characters very much. The ending however was a bit anticlimactic and a bit abrupt.

Old school mystery

Any additional comments?

Loved this book. The narrator was an absolute pleasure to listen to, and was able to switch back and forth effortlessly between voices. The story is one I've never read before, and given that I'm a British mystery fan, I'm surprised at myself!

Beautifully paced, the story involves a tried and true twin-switcheroo scam, along with horses (I loved the horse scenes!), and a sedate love story. Loved the character development and fell in love with Bea and Brat.

Highly recommend this book.

Brat Farrar

Spend the credit. Excellent in its character-driven plot. None of my ubiquitous frustrations with listening. Could not stop listening until its last chapter. Deeply satisfying listen.

Not the same ol' like I thought it would be!

Any additional comments?

I thought this was going to be similar to the Importance of being Ernest, but it was far from it! Well written, descriptive details about each character. Nice plot and the story flowed easily, no unnecessary gobbilty gook! Good story, I liked it! Great reader!

What a novel is to be - entertaining

I save my five stars for amazing. This was well worth the read, but not amazing. I would recommend it.

Good old fashioned story; great narrator

I listened to this book after reading reviews of Josephine Tey stories and this narrator's performance. I was not disappointed. Liked the story but loved the performance. I will listen to more books by this combination.

Great story, beautifully performed!

Character development is well done, story suspenseful, descriptions thorough and meaningful. I really enjoyed this!