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The Swimming Pool Library
- Narrated by: Samuel West
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
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One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.
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Amazing Story Teller
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By: William Boyd
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The Secret Keeper
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England, 1959: Laurel Nicolson is 16 years old, dreaming alone in her childhood tree house during a family celebration at their home, Green Acres Farm. She spies a stranger coming up the long road to the farm and then observes her mother, Dorothy, speaking to him. And then she witnesses a crime.
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Kate Morton (and Caroline Lee) does it again!
- By Maria on 10-20-12
By: Kate Morton
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Asylum
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In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
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So enjoyed this book!
- By Mebythesea on 10-07-08
By: Patrick McGrath
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The Muse
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England, 1967. Odelle Bastien is a Caribbean émigré trying to make her way in London. When she starts working at the prestigious Skelton Institute of Art, she discovers a painting rumored to be the work of Isaac Robles, a young artist of immense talent and vision whose mysterious death has confounded the art world for decades. The excitement over the painting is matched by the intrigue around the conflicting stories of its discovery.
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Mixed narration
- By Amy Fleury on 08-05-16
By: Jessie Burton
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The Berlin Stories
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Christopher Isherwood's dramatized memoirs are prophetic images of a country preparing itself to embrace Hitler and the Third Reich. The Berlin Stories includes two works published together: The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin. These modern classics reveal in poignant detail the tragedy of mid-20th-century Germany.
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Nothing happens...
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Before I Met You
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After her grandmother Arlette's death, Betty is finally ready to begin her life. She had forfeited university, parties, boyfriends, summer jobs in order to care for Arlette. Now she's ready for whatever life throws at her, and, since the will included a beneficiary unknown to her who lives in the city, she heads there to find the mysterious woman. In 1920s London, Arlette is starting her new life in a time of postwar change. Beautiful and charismatic, she's drawn into a hedonistic world, but then tragedy strikes, and she flees back to her childhood home....
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Awful
- By cristina on 08-13-18
By: Lisa Jewell
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A Share in Death
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A week's holiday in a luxurious hotel is just what Scotland Yard's Superintendent Duncan Kincaid needs. But his vacation ends dramatically with the discovery of a dead body in the whirlpool bath. Despite a suspicious lack of cooperation from the local constabulary, Kincaid's keen sense of duty won't allow him to ignore the heinous crime, impelling him to send for his enthusiastic young assistant, Sergeant Gemma James. But the stakes are raised significantly when a second murder occurs....
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series readers, start here
- By connie on 02-09-13
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The Magus
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One of the best novels that I really think I hate.
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
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Cassie settled down too young, marrying her first serious boyfriend. Now, 10 years later, she is betrayed and broken. With her marriage in tatters and no career or home of her own, she needs to work out where she belongs in the world and who she really is. So begins a yearlong trial as Cassie leaves her sheltered life in rural Scotland to stay with each of her best friends in the most glamorous cities in the world: New York, Paris and London.
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Perfectly Indulgent!
- By Abby Welker on 12-05-17
By: Karen Swan
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What listeners say about The Swimming Pool Library
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- RareReviewer
- 03-26-23
Well-written, tragic story; confusing (at times) narration
The story itself is well written. The first-person main character is fully realized: flawed, compulsive, shallow, unfaithful…yet not entirely unredeemable, despite how we suspect he feels about himself.
And the story, eventually covering as it does the first four-fifths of the 20th century, is expertly told, with details and allusions and language that immerses us completely into the underground (at first) and eventually overt world of “the homosexual.” The sex is graphic and frequent (this being the main character’s compulsive and primary occupation), but the story is tragic on so many levels: the many lives destroyed by the various legal proscriptions against gay sex; social opprobrium against the same (although this book makes higher society’s hypocrisy on the issue apparent); the seeming futility of loving relationships between men during this time due to the erosions caused by legal and social disapprovals; and finally, just off-stage of this story, waiting in the wings, is the specter of AIDS. For the reader, at least, it’s hard not imagine many of these characters dead within a few years even though, written as it is in the first person, there is no intimation of the epidemic set to decimate a generation or two of gay men.
The narrator of the audio book does an otherwise excellent job EXCEPT: several lengthy passages are from diaries written by another character 60 to 30 years before the story’s main action. The narrator (otherwise able to deliver accents to distinguish characters) makes no distinction between the diary entries and the contemporary narration. As a result, it was often difficult to tell when a diary entry had ended and the contemporary narration had resumed. I checked out the digital copy of this book from my library to follow along primarily to avoid this confusion. Having a text version of the book was also handy for some British slang and other terms I needed to see to understand in context.
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- John
- 08-04-12
Hollinghurst's first and among the best.
If you could sum up The Swimming Pool Library in three words, what would they be?
great period piece
What did you like best about this story?
Listening to it twenty years after reading it made me realize how much I had changed. It's a great description of upper class British life. Hollinghurst's lush writing is in full bloom.
What does Samuel West bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Sam West's narration makes this an good example of listening surpassing reading. His Lord Nantwich is spot on. It's Hollinghurst's ear for British language that provides such great material. Sam brings the fellow to life.
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
Gay England in the late 20th century.
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4 people found this helpful
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- T Cyr
- 05-08-14
Fun & Interesting, with lots of steamy bits!
Samuel West keeps this story interesting and going through great definition of character. Not sure where the plot was always going, or even if there was a plot, more like the meanderings of the main character's thoughts. Lots of great sex, vivid and colorful romp into gay life. Kind of a refreshing journey to be taken on to a time forgotten, how carefree the 80's actually were. Hollinghurst is an interesting writer who puts the most interesting spin on the most banal circumstances. Totally enjoyed all the way through. It's a great book to listen to while you garden.
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- ChrisW
- 01-23-16
A meandering journey
I enjoyed this book quite a lot. The storyline goes on without much point, but the emotion, feeling and self absorption of the main character is very interesting.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jason
- 04-21-18
Magnificent
A lush and honest look at gay life over the last century, and the threads of love that bind us
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- Lidiaburley
- 09-10-19
great read!
I adore this book - multi-layered, full of allusions to set and literature, there's a lot of sex, and a lot of musing about sex, but I wouldn't call it a vulgar book by any means. like most Hollinghurst books the main character is a brilliant English gay man. in this one he's delightfully vain, superficial, yet has a poignsnt quality as well
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Overall
- Peregrine
- 05-15-11
Strong stuff
Swimming Pool Library is beautifully written and will give you a vivid picture of the life depicted. As a straight man I endeavored to give all the gay sexuality the same distance I gave the sexuality of "straight" characters whose taste differs from mine--cf. Lolita or anything by Pynchon. But don't think you can just skim over it and get back to the plot. Gay sexuality is THE subject of this book.
Excellent reader.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Fredrick Keen
- 08-24-22
Oh the English!
Delightful proper English & a glimpse into those bygone times when it was dangerous in England to be queer. We are relentless in our pursuit of sex & happiness!
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- Mark Breda
- 11-11-22
Hollinghurt’s best
This is undoubtedly Hollinghurts best novel, and one of my favorite books all time. Too bad the rest of his books are drivel. This is very well narrated as an audio book
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Overall
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Performance
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- RJD
- 04-15-23
Excellent reading
As almost always, West delivers an ideal performance.
That’s said, I’m intrigued by recent-ish reader/listener reviews of this novel, here and even more on GoodReads, etc., readers who seem to to me to “misunderstand” the novel’s narrative approach (the plot even) and simply react with disgust toward the character of Beckwith as if that’s their enlightened reading against the text. Some of this is no doubt due to homophobia colliding with uni requirements to read gay texts, some of it is inevitable cancel culture echos, but not all of it. My idea of the novel is, I think, in line with/shaped by how the novel was reviewed in 1988 and subsequently discussed in academia and the media. But I don’t know—I do suspect many of us might be a bit more “Beckwithian”, a bit more complicit than should make us comfortable. After all, despite the subsequent AIDS years, Beckwith isn’t quite right to claim the world he narrates came to an end in 1983.
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