Galapagos Regained

A Novel

James Morrow's Galpagos Regained centers on the fictional Chloe Bathurst, an unemployed Victorian actress who finds work on Charles Darwin's estate, nurturing the strange birds, exotic lizards, and giant tortoises he brought back from his trip around the world.

When Chloe gets wind of the Great God Contest, sponsored by the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society - 10,000 pounds to the first petitioner who can prove or disprove the existence of a Supreme Being - she decides that Mr. Darwin's materialist theory of speciation might just do the trick. (If nature gave God nothing to do, maybe he was never around in the first place.)

Before she knows it, her ambitions send her off on a wild adventure - a voyage by brigantine to Brazil, a steamboat trip up the Amazon, a hot-air balloon flight across the Andes - bound for the Galpagos archipelago, where she intends to collect the live specimens through which she might demonstrate evolutionary theory to the contest judges.

©2014 James Morrow. All rights reserved (P)2015 Audible Inc.

terrible narrator

I'm not reviewing the book itself, because I can't get more than 20 minutes in because of the reader.

Couldn't finish it

The narrator's accent is a great distraction from the content of the novel. I have checked the hard copy out of the local library in order to finish it. After three hours, I was contemplating why I let myself get so far in a book I hated. I decided I did not hate the content, only the voice delivering it.