Desperate Remedies

De: Thomas Hardy

Narrado por: Anna Bentinck

Thomas Hardy's first published novel, Desperate Remedies is a thrilling blend of Gothic mystery and love-triangle romance.

After the untimely death of their parents, Cytheria and Owen Graye must go out into the world and fend for themselves. Cytheria's journey leads her to the dark and mysterious household of Miss Aldclyffe, a capricious and eccentric woman, who steers Cytheria into a love affair with her charismatic steward, Aeneous Manston. All is not what it seems, and Cytheria finds herself entangled in a violent web of lust, murder, deception, and blackmail.

With its beautiful and evocative scenes, along with themes of fate and class, the novel contains many traces of Hardy's signature style, and is a unique take on the Victorian 'sensation' novel.

Download the accompanying reference guide.Public Domain (P)2017 Naxos AudioBooks

So glad I finished it.

The thing that keeps me reading Hardy books is because . . . well, it's Hardy. Sometimes difficult but always good. My advice is to change the narration speed up to 1.2x - perfect.

Excellent!!!

I thought I’d read all of Thomas Hardy’s novels, and then came across this one. Figured it might not be great, since I hadn’t heard of it, but love Hardy, so read it. It is exceptional! So intriguing and suspenseful!

A thriller!

Anna Bentinck gives a terrific reading of this early novel by Thomas Hardy. She's becoming one of my favorite narrators.

The chapters in Desperate Remedies are organized by time - nothing unusual about that in a conventional novel. But in this one, the time covered by each chapter is announced loudly and clearly by the chapter title: The Events of Three Weeks, The Events of Ten Months, The Events of One Day: with the date and sometimes the hour of the day precisely named.

At this point it shouldn't be a spoiler to say the book has a mostly happy ending. It gets there by some of the most melodramatically thrilling plot twists Hardy ever wrote. Toward the end it becomes something of a mystery novel, with one professional and several amateur detectives on the case; and it's topped off with not one but two deathbed confessions.

A hugely enjoyable listen for me (and I hope for others as well).

Innocence Besieged

I am generically a romantic era (approximately 1805 through 1880) novel fan. Think, Austen, Brontë, Hugo, and Dumas. Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy, comes from that era and is written in its style, i.e.. proper Victorian undertakings performed in adherence to societal values, written in flowery language, and ‘in-the-end,’ all works out well. Hardy is one of its premier novelists, but Desperate Memories was his first published novel, and its story has weak and not believable hapenstances. It does, though, still have exciting plot twists that keep the reader very well entertained. This is the story of an innocent and lovely girl, whose attractiveness is sought after by both diabolic and virtuous. The battle of evil versus good.

Dreadful reading

The book and the author are wonderful but the reading was painful and totally lacking in depth, nuance or feeling. I couldn't stomach it and feel that it was a waist of my money.