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The Birthday Present
- Narrated by: Ruth Sillers, Paul Blake
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
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The Birthday Present
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Publisher's summary
Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young Member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter–a beautiful, married woman named Hebe–the two become lovers, obsessed with their illicit and adventurous trysts. But when Ivor plans for a surprise daring sexual adventure as a birthday present for Hebe, things take a disastrous turn it's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing: between Ivor, a rising star of the Conservative government, and Hebe, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a dull marriage. On the eve of her birthday, Ivor gives Hebe a present to remember: a mock-kidnapping in which she is to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and then delivered to him. It’s all intended as mock-dangerous foreplay, but then things take a disastrous turn. After an accidental death, Ivor begins to receive anonymous letters that reveal shockingly specific details about the affair and its aftermath. Somehow he must keep his role from being uncovered–and his political future from being destroyed by scandal.
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
When the Templeton family from England takes up residence in a stately home in country Australia, they set the locals talking – and with good reason. From the outside, the seven Templetons seem so bohemian, peculiar even. No one is more intrigued by the family than their neighbours, single mother Nina Donovan and her young son Tom. Before long, the two families' lives become entwined in unexpected ways.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A dreadful mistake
- By Julie on 11-14-10
By: Monica McInerney
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The Blood Doctor
- By: Barbara Vine
- Narrated by: Robert Powell
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 71
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 71
The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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5 out of 5 stars
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clever, excellent storytelling
- By connie on 07-09-11
By: Barbara Vine
-
The Heart's Invisible Furies
- A Novel
- By: John Boyne
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6,818
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 6,200
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6,169
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding. A Must listen.
- By Keith G on 09-04-17
By: John Boyne
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Hero: A Simon Serrailler Short Story
- By: Susan Hill
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey
- Length: 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 128
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 111
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 110
When Simon Serrailler was a rookie constable with the Met, he did something reckless in the course of a night's work which caused a man's death. But his act was praised by his colleagues, and he was called a hero. Years later, now a detective chief superintendent who has been badly injured in the course of duty, he receives a medal for bravery at Buckingham Palace while recollecting that fateful night of his early career, when chance disguised itself as bravery.
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4 out of 5 stars
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This 'story' makes no sense to me
- By Pamela Donaldson on 05-10-17
By: Susan Hill
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Hello from the Gillespies
- By: Monica McInerney
- Narrated by: Ulli Birvé
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 169
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 152
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 155
For the past 33 years, Angela Gillespie has sent to friends and family around the world an end-of-the-year letter titled ‘Hello from the Gillespies’. It’s always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises herself - she tells the truth....
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4 out of 5 stars
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Engaging
- By mgn on 08-18-15
By: Monica McInerney
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The Body on the Beach
- A Fethering Mystery
- By: Simon Brett
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,164
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,027
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,029
Recently retired, Carole Seddon is residing in Fethering in the cottage she purchased with her ex-husband. There she maintains a quiet and sensible life with the companionship of Gulliver, her Labrador retriever. But everything changes when she and Gulliver, while taking their daily constitutional, find a corpse on the beach. What's more, there are two wounds on its neck. The body mysteriously disappears and the police dismiss Carole as a befuddled middle-aged woman.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Reminds me of "Rosemary & Thyme" TV series
- By Crochetaway on 11-17-14
By: Simon Brett
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Watermelon
- By: Marian Keyes
- Narrated by: Gerri Halligan
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 62
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
At 29, Claire is full of the joys of life - that is, until her husband leaves her on the day she gives birth to her baby. With a broken heart, a beautiful newly born and an expanding mirror image, she decides to visit her eccentric family in Dublin. There she starts to feel better. So much better, in fact, that James is in for a surprise when he decides to slither back into her life....
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5 out of 5 stars
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A fun read, every time
- By Audrey Smith on 01-06-23
By: Marian Keyes
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Shadow of a Century
- By: Jean Grainger
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 261
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 228
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 225
Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved this book!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-20
By: Jean Grainger
-
Talking It Over
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey, Alex Jennings, Clare Higgins
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 93
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 84
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 83
Introducing Stuart, Gillian and Oliver. One by one they take their turn to speak straight out to the camera - and give their side of a contemporary love triangle. What begins as a comedy of misunderstanding slowly darkens and deepens into a compelling exploration of the quagmires of the heart.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Narrative Gimmick Works
- By Alan on 11-22-11
By: Julian Barnes
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How It All Began
- By: Penelope Lively
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 458
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 391
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 389
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Wonderful and beautifully written
- By Molly-o on 02-15-12
By: Penelope Lively
-
The Good Friday Murder
- A Christine Bennett Mystery, Book 1
- By: Lee Harris
- Narrated by: Dee Macaluso
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 70
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 61
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 62
Christine Bennett has left the cloistered world of nuns for the profane world of New York State, where murder and madness are often linked. At a town meeting, Christine volunteers to investigate a 40-year-old murder case long since closed. Now she'll move heaven and earth to exonerate a pair of retarded savant twins, now senior citizens, of their mother's murder on Good Friday in 1950.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
Polite procedural cozy
- By connie on 12-29-12
By: Lee Harris
-
Mrs Queen Takes the Train
- By: William Kuhn
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,120
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,910
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 1,903
An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn - author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books - Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team of courtiers who must find the missing Windsor before a national scandal erupts.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Can't believe how much I loved this story
- By analyzethis on 03-10-13
By: William Kuhn
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Past Imperfect
- By: Julian Fellowes
- Narrated by: Richard Morant
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,172
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,023
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,015
Damian Baxter is hugely wealthy and dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, England, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern--his fortune in excess of 500 million and who should inherit it on his death.
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3 out of 5 stars
-
Read Snobs instead
- By cristina on 02-14-13
By: Julian Fellowes
-
Cold Hand in Mine
- By: Robert Aickman
- Narrated by: Reece Shearsmith
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 84
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 73
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 74
Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full. The listener is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ("Pages from a Young Girl's Journal") but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Aickman is unique
- By Stark on 08-19-23
By: Robert Aickman
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In the waning months of the second World War, a group of children discover an earthen tunnel in their neighborhood outside London. Throughout the summer of 1944 - until one father forbids it - the subterranean space becomes their "secret garden," where the friends play games and tell stories. Six decades later, beneath a house on the same land, construction workers uncover a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female.
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Kept unfolding more twists and turns
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3 out of 5 stars
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Reader emits noises that are distracting
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It is 1905. Asta and her husband, Rasmus, have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over 70 years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter, Ann, to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Confusing, by it could just have been me
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The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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clever, excellent storytelling
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Gallowglass
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 18
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Sandor is a wonderful storyteller and little Joe is ready to listen. The power of the educated over the simple is horribly clear in this disturbing and unusual relationship. As Sandor’s motivation both for rescuing little Joe and then for weaving his spell of words becomes clear, the darkness surrounding him is too much for them both, and for the beautiful ex-model sequestered in her Suffolk mansion by an obsessive husband.
By: Barbara Vine
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A Fatal Inversion
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-
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-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 85
-
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In the long, hot summer of 1976, a group of young people is camping in Wyvis Hall. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there or how they are to live; they scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and child are discovered in the Hall’s animal cemetery. Which woman? And whose child?
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Oh my!
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The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy
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-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 102
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 90
When literary celebrity Gerald Candless suddenly dies, the beautiful façade he has carefully created begins to crumble. Behind the vision of the happy family on the English seashore lie Candless’ inexplicable cruelty toward his wife, his manic devotion to his daughters, and the mysterious sources of his fiction. To assuage her grief, his loving daughter Sarah begins a memoir project. But it soon becomes an obsessive search for identity. As Sarah digs into her father’s secret past, the startling logic of his puzzling behavior is revealed.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of my Top 20 books
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Talking to Strange Men
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 42
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-
Story4 out of 5 stars 31
Safe houses and secret message drops, double crosses and defections - it sounds like the stuff of sophisticated espionage, but these agents are only schoolboys engaged in harmless play. Not that John Creevey knows this. To him, the messages he decodes with painstaking care are the communications of dangerous and evil men, and as he comes face to face with the fact of his beloved wife Jennifer's defection, he begins to see a way to get back at the man she left him for.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful narrator Wonderful writing
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Thirteen Steps Down
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 48
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Mix Cellini (which he pronounces with an S rather than a C) is superstitious about the number 13 and has always felt dogged by ill-luck. In the house where he lives, there are 13 steps down to the landing below his rooms. His landlady lives her life almost exclusively through her library, blind to the neglect and decay around her. However, Mix is obsessed with the life of the notorious John Christie, who lived in the same Notting Hill neighbourhood at 10 Rillington Place.
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5 out of 5 stars
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As always, Rendell writes a very engaging yarn!
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What listeners say about The Birthday Present
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars
- Yennta
- 08-04-09
Love This Writer Always, But...
This was so terrific, so far above most other thriller/novel writers, and in fact this is a novel rather than a thriller. You can tell because Ruth Rendell is being Barbara Vine here, in one of her -- what my cousin calls -- sociopath novels. BUT I just reread (re-listened to) The Minotaur also by B.Vine. I was blown away by how absolutely riveting it was the second time around. It may be her best. READ THE MINOTAUR. It's such a stunner.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
- Lesley
- 05-02-09
Social Crime
A very British theme ... a gentleman must do what a gentleman must do. A landed gentry politician with 'out of the norm' sexual preferences is plagued throughout his career by an 'accident' which would expose him if it were ever examined closely. We follow his anxiety through the eyes of his brother-in-law and through the eyes of his dead lover's bridesmaid. The brother-in-law is super conservative and unexceptional. The bridesmaid is ... unstable. Crime plays a very small part in the whole story. Insinuation and assumption play very large parts. Different, but absorbing and told by a master story teller. The narrators are to be applauded.
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7 people found this helpful
-
Overall2 out of 5 stars
- Quahog
- 03-13-10
Atypical Vine
I have always read or listened to any new book by Barbara Vine that appears. Her best books can make me shiver in recollection even years later. This is the first that I've found boring. There are two narrators, neither of them likable, and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief in the plot, which seemed to drag on. Nor could I care about the off-putting central character. A disappointment.
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4 people found this helpful