The Gap of Time

The Winter's Tale Retold (Hogarth Shakespeare)

De: Jeanette Winterson

Narrado por: Ben Onwukwe, Mark Bazeley, Penelope Rawlins

"I saw the strangest sight tonight." New Bohemia. America. A storm. A black man finds a white baby abandoned in the night. He gathers her up - light as a star - and decides to take her home.

London. England. After the financial crash. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money, but he doesn't know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. Is his newborn baby even his?

New Bohemia. Seventeen years later. A boy and a girl are falling in love, but there's a lot they don't know about who they are and where they come from.

Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale vibrates with echoes of the original but tells a contemporary story where time itself is a player in a game of high stakes that will end in either tragedy or forgiveness. It shows us that however far we have been separated, whatever is lost shall be found.

©2015 Jeanette Winterson (P)2015 Random House AudioBooks

A fine reworking of The Winter's Tale, but ...

Where does The Gap of Time rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Hard to say. I like the narrative--the novel is a lovely reworking of Shakespeare's wonderful odd pastoral romnance the Winter's Tale, but the narration is mixed, and much of it is awful, irritating.

What did you like best about this story?

The narrative and the weirdness of the genre that is romance.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of the narrators?

I don't know. There are several narrators. Perdita is ghastly, as is Xeno (Polixenes), as is Pauline (Paulina). Perdita's voice is squeaky and irritatingly childlike for a 16-year-old (or is she 18?). Her Southern American accent struck me as unconvincing, but it's not as bad as Xeno's upper-class English twit accent/tone. I stuck it out because I wanted to know what happened, but my advice would be choose the print version for this one. Pity.

Time

Jeanette Winterson always offers something beautiful and poetic, The Gap of Time, is no exception. Creative, interesting, sad, funny and poignant. I’m obsessed with time - so this was even more so of interest for me.