The Betrayals

A Novel

By: Bridget Collins

Narrated by: Bridget Collins, Sam Woolf, Sarah Ovens

The Betrayals has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

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!

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.

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.