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The Well-Beloved
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Wessex Tales
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Neville Jason
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including "The Three Strangers", "The Withered Arm", and "The Distracted Preacher", deals with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy’s work: marriage, class, revenge, and disappointed love. Many of the tales have a supernatural tinge, and all are set around Hardy’s much loved homeland.
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A Sampler
- By Tad Davis on 06-08-14
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Desperate Remedies
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston. Desperate Remedies contains sensational ingredients of blackmail, murder and romance, but with its insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy’s future genius.
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Hsrdy at his Best
- By Coug Dude on 09-06-18
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Pamela Garelick
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story builds into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power, only to achieve a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, "Hardy's Lord Jim...his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction."
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Fabulous
- By Biggar Thomas on 01-06-05
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The Return of the Native
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Alan Rickman
- Length: 15 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Set on Egdon Heath, a fictional barren moor in Wessex, Eustacia Vye longs for the excitement of city life but is cut off from the world in her grandfather's lonely cottage. Clym Yeobright who has returned to the area to become a schoolmaster seems to offer everything she dreams of: passion, excitement and the opportunity to escape. However, Clym's ambitions are quite different, and marriage only increases Eustacia's destructive restlessness, drawing others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.
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Always Hardy
- By Wallen on 04-20-11
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The Woodlanders
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Woodlanders is vintage Hardy. The story revolves around the young woman Grace Melbury, who returns to the leafy world of Little Hintock and soon finds herself at the center of a number of tragic events. In penetrating, incisive, and beautiful prose, Hardy tells a moving tale of unrequited love as fate and the constraints of society thwart the happiness of our heroine. The leafy world of Blackmoor Vale and the hamlet of Little Hintock are all lovingly described by Hardy, who named The Woodlanders as the favorite of all his novels.
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A Masterpiece of writing and narration!
- By Kathi on 05-17-14
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Our Mutual Friend
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Stacy Newman
- Length: 35 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, "Our Mutual Friend" revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap's expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights "Noddy" Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman." Charles Dickens's last complete novel, "Our Mutual Friend" encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it.
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Thought-provoking if Drawn Out
- By Allyson on 11-14-18
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Wessex Tales
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Neville Jason
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including "The Three Strangers", "The Withered Arm", and "The Distracted Preacher", deals with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy’s work: marriage, class, revenge, and disappointed love. Many of the tales have a supernatural tinge, and all are set around Hardy’s much loved homeland.
-
-
A Sampler
- By Tad Davis on 06-08-14
-
Desperate Remedies
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston. Desperate Remedies contains sensational ingredients of blackmail, murder and romance, but with its insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy’s future genius.
-
-
Hsrdy at his Best
- By Coug Dude on 09-06-18
-
The Mayor of Casterbridge
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Pamela Garelick
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story builds into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power, only to achieve a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, "Hardy's Lord Jim...his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction."
-
-
Fabulous
- By Biggar Thomas on 01-06-05
-
The Return of the Native
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Alan Rickman
- Length: 15 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set on Egdon Heath, a fictional barren moor in Wessex, Eustacia Vye longs for the excitement of city life but is cut off from the world in her grandfather's lonely cottage. Clym Yeobright who has returned to the area to become a schoolmaster seems to offer everything she dreams of: passion, excitement and the opportunity to escape. However, Clym's ambitions are quite different, and marriage only increases Eustacia's destructive restlessness, drawing others into a tangled web of deceit and unhappiness.
-
-
Always Hardy
- By Wallen on 04-20-11
-
The Woodlanders
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Woodlanders is vintage Hardy. The story revolves around the young woman Grace Melbury, who returns to the leafy world of Little Hintock and soon finds herself at the center of a number of tragic events. In penetrating, incisive, and beautiful prose, Hardy tells a moving tale of unrequited love as fate and the constraints of society thwart the happiness of our heroine. The leafy world of Blackmoor Vale and the hamlet of Little Hintock are all lovingly described by Hardy, who named The Woodlanders as the favorite of all his novels.
-
-
A Masterpiece of writing and narration!
- By Kathi on 05-17-14
-
Our Mutual Friend
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Stacy Newman
- Length: 35 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, "Our Mutual Friend" revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap's expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights "Noddy" Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman." Charles Dickens's last complete novel, "Our Mutual Friend" encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it.
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Thought-provoking if Drawn Out
- By Allyson on 11-14-18
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A Group of Noble Dames
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Nigel Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A Group of Noble Dames is an 1891 collection of short stories by great English novelist Thomas Hardy. The ten stories focus on "store of ladies, whose bright eyes rain influence". Hardy delves into the hidden depths of country families to reveal what went on behind the scenes.
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Call Me by Your Name
- A Novel
- By: André Aciman
- Narrated by: Armie Hammer
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Call Me by Your Name first swept across the world in 2007. It is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. During the restless summer weeks, unrelenting but buried currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them and verge toward the one thing both already fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy.
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Amazing.
- By Nico L. on 10-07-17
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Two on a Tower
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Michael Kitchen
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Two on a Tower is Hardy's ninth novel and contains perhaps his most complete use of the theme of love across the class and age divide, to beautifully depict Hardy's reverence for science and astronomy. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social etiquette when she falls in love with young Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer and her social inferior. Despite their differences that society deems unacceptable, together, from an astronomical observatory, the lovers 'sweep the heavens'.
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Old fashined love story
- By Kisha on 09-01-09
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Mrs. Dalloway
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.
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One Tough Read Perfectly Delivered
- By Chris on 06-11-12
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Howards End
- By: E. M. Forster
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Howards End is a beautifully subtle tale of two very different families brought together by an unusual event. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of "telegrams and anger". When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home - Howards End - to one of the Schlegel sisters, a crisis between the two families is precipitated that takes years to resolve.
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Fantastic Narration in Delightful Story
- By Wren on 05-05-18
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A Pair of Blue Eyes
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Story
Hardy's third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, follows the story of Elfride Swancourt. The daughter of the rector of Endelstow, a sparse, sea-swept parish in Cornwall, Elfride is caught between two suitors of very different backgrounds: Stephen Smith, a young architect restoring the old parish church; and the respectable, older man of London society, Henry Knight. The blue-eyed and high-spirited protagonist must untangle the conflicting messages of her heart and her mind.
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Depressing story & unbelievable central character
- By Molly R. on 08-14-17
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A Laodicean
- A Story of To-day
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Subtitled 'A Story of To-day', A Laodicean occupies a unique place in the Thomas Hardy canon. Departing from pre-industrial Wessex, Hardy brings his themes of social constraint, fate, chance and miscommunication to the very modern world of the 1880s - complete with falsified telegraphs, fake photographs, and perilous train tracks. The story follows the life of Paula Power, heiress of her late father's railroad fortune and the new owner of the medieval Castle Stancy. With the castle in need of restoration, Paula employs architect George Somerset, who soon falls in love with her.
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Uncharacteristic
- By Tad Davis on 01-31-19
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Excellent Women
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Jayne Entwistle
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those excellent women - the smart, supportive, repressed women whom men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors - anthropologist Helena Napier; Helen's handsome, dashing husband, Rocky; and Julian Malory, the vicar next door - the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived.
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Still Waters Run Deep
- By Sara on 04-13-16
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Northanger Abbey
- By: Jane Austen
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
When Catherine Morland, a country clergyman's daughter, is invited to spend a season in Bath with the fashionable high society, little does she imagine the delights and perils that await her. Captivated and disconcerted by what she finds, and introduced to the joys of "Gothic novels" by her new friend, Isabella, Catherine longs for mystery and romance. When she is invited to stay with the beguiling Henry Tilney and his family at Northanger Abbey, she expects mystery and intrigue at every turn.
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Awesome
- By Johnny on 08-01-09
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Mr. Churchill's Secretary
- A Maggie Hope Mystery
- By: Susan Elia MacNeal
- Narrated by: Donada Peters
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
London, 1940: Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds in British intelligence, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typist at No. 10 Downing Street. Her indefatigable spirit and gifts for codebreaking, though, rival those of even the highest men in government, and Maggie finds that working for the prime minister affords her a level of clearance she could never have imagined....
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Lovely
- By Katherine on 10-22-12
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Jude The Obscure
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Stephen Thorne
- Length: 15 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.
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Staggering
- By Tad Davis on 02-16-10
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Mansfield Park
- By: Jane Austen
- Narrated by: Sinead Dixon
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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"We have all been more or less to blame... every one of us, excepting Fanny." Taken from the poverty of her parents' home, Fanny Price is brought up with her rich cousins at Mansfield Park, acutely aware of her humble rank and with only her cousin Edmund as an ally. When Fanny's uncle is absent in Antigua, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive in the neighbourhood, bringing with them London glamour and a reckless taste for flirtation. As her female cousins vie for Henry's attention, and even Edmund falls for Mary's dazzling charms, only Fanny remains doubtful about the Crawfords' influence and finds herself more isolated than ever.
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Truly lovely
- By BookWyrm on 09-16-18
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-22-16
Fickle Love on Portland and in London
Lesser known Hard nove. Enjoyable walking my home island with the characters. Great narrator. Do listen.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
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- J. Staines
- 07-30-14
Love the voice, but it's not enough
Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?
I like Thomas Hardy novels, but despite this one being read by one of my favourite voice actors, it was not enough to hold my attention. The story rambles and I lost all sympathy with the protagonist. I didn't finish the book.
Would you ever listen to anything by Thomas Hardy again?
Yes.
What does Robert Powell bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?
He has a beautiful voice and reads very well, bringing his characters to life. He manages to read the female parts in a very believable way, as well, which is no mean feat.
Did The Well-Beloved inspire you to do anything?
Only to stop reading it! To be honest, it did get me to sleep quite well on a number of nights, which is no bad thing since I often find it difficult. But then, probably almost any book read by Robert Powell would have done that job.
Any additional comments?
I'm glad I tried it, since it was one of the few Hardy's I have never read.
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- Angelcritique
- 09-27-18
A good story spoiled
I was in great anticipation finding that Robert Powell was the narrator of this Thomas Hardy story, as I'm a longstanding admirer of Robert's work. Sadly I am bewidered, disappointed and decidedly irritated by this experienced and well respected actor's continuous mis-pronounciation of the commonplace female name of 'Avice' throughout the entire book. It's pronounced 'AY-VISS.' Not pronouncing the 'A' like the 'A' in 'hat' and 'cat'. Like in the word 'Avarice'. What's wrong with him? Has he never met a lady with this name in his long life. Does he not research his projects beforehand? Obviously not. I expected more from this esteemed actor's narration here. It spoils the entire listening experience for me. I guess I'll read the book myself to overlay a more positive memory of the novel.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful