The Betrayals

A Novel

By: Bridget Collins

Narrated by: Bridget Collins, Sam Woolf, Sarah Ovens

Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

An intricate and utterly spellbinding literary epic brimming with enchantment, mystery, and dark secrets from the highly acclaimed author of the #1 international bestseller The Binding.

If your life was based on a lie, would you risk it all to tell the truth?

At Montverre, an ancient and elite academy hidden high in the mountains, society's best and brightest are trained for excellence in the grand jeu—the great game—an arcane and mysterious competition that combines music, art, math, poetry, and philosophy. Léo Martin once excelled at Monteverre, but lost his passion for scholarly pursuits after a violent tragedy. He turned to politics instead, and became a rising star in the ruling party, until a small act of conscience cost him his career. Now, he has been exiled back to Monteverre, his fate uncertain.

But this rarified world of learning he once loved is not the same place Léo remembers. Once the exclusive bastion of men, Montverre is now run by a woman: Claire Dryden, also known as Magister Ludi, the head of the grand game. At first, Léo feels an odd attraction to the Magister—a mysterious, eerily familiar connection—though he's sure they've never met before.

As the legendary Midsummer Game approaches—the climax of the academy's year—long-buried secrets rise to the surface and centuries-old traditions are shockingly overturned.

A highly imaginative and intricately crafted literary epic, The Betrayals confirms Bridget Collins as one of the most inventive and exquisite new voices in speculative fiction.

©2021 Bridget Collins (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

“The Betrayals is a beautiful dystopian romance about coming of age as an artist and the love affair artistic collaboration can be, while also being an acute political novel about the fate of spiritual values in a totalitarian system. A rich delight." (Sandra Newman, author The Heavens and The Country of Ice Cream Star)

This one will stay with me

Beautiful writing, brilliant storytelling. A powerful parable for our time. The narrative arc is masterful and heart wrenching. It is exquisitely painful to read, but impossible to put down.

Wonderful

Oh, what a glorious book! Having read the Magister Ludi many moons ago, I was curious to see who had the audacity to try and build on it. Well, Bridget Collins didn't build, she flew off the turrets and took me on a glorious ride through a love story, mystery and tragedy, against a backdrop of a frightening, totalitarian, regime. It hovers, a lot, on emotional precipices: that conjure up all kinds of nightmares, or pushes you to remember intense first passions, then pokes fingers of sunlight through. It is also full of surprises and never lets on.
On a more practical level, it's a solid story following the relationship between 2 young men, competing for the highest honour at an elite school whose atmosphere is refined, high minded, monastic. This provides a pertinent contrast to all the human failings that are revealed and the flawed lives that weave in and out of each other.
There was one character, The Rat, that I really struggled with because I didn't know if she was meant to be an alter ego, past memory or, what? - it was quite irritating - but then all became clear. The narrators were astonishingly good. I will seek out more books by them. Bravo to everyone!

Brilliant

This was one of the best books I’ve heard in quite a while. I had to keep going back to wherever I had lost the thread of the story because the plot moves forward and develops through a complicated series of events and I found myself losing the thread more often than usual, however, the plot twists, the character development and the tantalizing undercurrent of impending tragedy all together had me completely hooked. I loved it.

A Bit too Abstract for Me

I read The Binding before this book and thought it was great. Both books have the 'what is going on here' story but The Binding cleared some up part way through. I wanted this story to clear up regarding the 'Game' but it did not (at least to my satisfaction). The author references a book by Herman Hess that she was influenced by for this book but I am unfamiliar with it. Maybe the 'Game' would have been clearer to me if I had read that previously. That being said I still enjoyed the book and the interaction of the characters and was anxious to get back to the story each day.

Different, but amazing.

I loved it. I thought I knew what was going to happen, but I didn't. And that's the kind of books I like.

Well......

This review is hard to write. Some of this book was great and yet, it just seemed too long for the story. I can always tell what I feel about a book, when I speed up the reading. This one got to a 1.5. Just sayin.

A new favorite author

First, the performance was expert level. So much so I forgot I was listening to narrators and looked forward to every switch of character.
Second, I have no idea why some of the reviews say this was any less thorough than The Binder. If anything, it was more rich and full and interesting with a thick plot, characters you love and hate and moments of crying out loud! I wish I could say more but I wouldn't want to give away a single thing. You won't regret listening to this book and I cannot wait for another from this author!

Excellent Performance and Prose - But No Magic

Hoping this helps someone who would otherwise make the same mistake that I did.

This is a story about something almost equivalent to a monastery in Nazi germany.

There is no game.

The tag "magical realism" is used in the classical sense and not the contemporary sense (like The Magicians by Lev Grossman).

If you're being recommended this because you enjoyed The Magicians or Scholomance, you're in the wrong neighborhood.

Even so, Collins is an EXCELLENT writer - the prose is quite masterful. Woolf also does a superb job on the performance. Even so, this was like ordering a hamburger at a restaurant and being surprised it is not made of ham. Entirely my fault, definitely edible, but not what I was after.

It was confusing

This book was very slow going. It took me quite a while to understand what was going on. Overall I liked the characters once things picked up, but it was really hard to stick with it to the end. Not as good as The Binding