Creator: Roy Marsden
Publication date: 1985-12
RRP: £36.37
Price: £38.36
Review A Mind to Murder: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Publication date: 2002-06-25
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £32.00
Price: £62.96
Review Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: Or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance / Sounds True Inc.,U.S.:
Publication date: 2004-09-20
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.95
Review Rosie / Simon & Schuster Audio:
Creator: Roy Marsden
Publication date: 1984-10
Price: £36.37
Review Gold Mine (Audiobook) / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Stephen Thorne
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1992-08
Price: £36.37
Review Dead Man's Ransom: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Jack Davenport
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1999-11-15
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £10.99
Price: £6.00
Review Remote Control / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: Michael Sheen
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1995-11
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £9.99
Price: £0.01
Review The Picture of Dorian Gray (Classic Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife", Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden. " As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. " But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. [+]" Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. " A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife", Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden. " As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. " But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. " Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. ".
Creator: Leslie Charleson
Publication date: 1990-02-01
Dewey code: 813
Price: £7.99
Review Petals on the Wind / Simon & Schuster Audio:
Creator: James Wilby
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1996-11-11
Price: £7.99
Review The Songlines (Reed Audio) / Random House Audiobooks:The late Bruce Chatwin carved out a literary career as unique as any writer's in this century: his books included In Patagonia, a fabulist travel narrative, The Viceroy of Ouidah, a mock-historical tale of a Brazilian slave-trader in 19th century Africa, and The Songlines, his beautiful, elegiac, comic account of following the invisible pathways traced by the Australian aborigines. Chatwin was nothing if not erudite, and the vast, eclectic body of literature that underlies this tale of trekking across the outback gives it a resonance found in few other recent travel books. A poignancy, as well, since Chatwin's untimely death made The Songlines one of his last books.
Authors
- Walt Disney Records
- Disney Sing-Along Csdisn 60971
Review Bugs Life / Disney Pr (Adult):
Creator: Julia McKenzie
Publication date: 1996-05
RRP: £36.37
Price: £60.67
Review Some Tame Gazelle: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Blair Brown
Publication date: 2002-02-07
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.50
Review Fortune's Rocks (Tape) / Orion:Hester Prynne never had it so good! The year is 1899, and Olympia Biddeford, the headstrong daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, has decided to test the limits of her cloistered world. Spending the summer at her father's New Hampshire estate, the teenage heroine of Fortune's Rocks is entranced with the visiting salon of artists, writers and lawyers. She's especially captivated, however, by John Haskell, a charismatic physician who ministers to the blue-collar community in the nearby mill towns. This middle-aged Good Samaritan hires Olympia to assist him as a nurse and their collaboration soon evolves into a fiery love affair. Alas, it's only a matter of weeks before this passionate exercise in managed care is exposed-with disastrous consequences for the young, impregnated heroine. Even her adoring father now considers her "an over-plump, 16-year-old girl whose judgement can no longer be trusted" and insists that she break off her relationship: "There is nothing more to be said on this subject", he says. She bites her lip to keep from crying out further. She holds the arms of her chair so tightly she later will have cramps in her fingers. She will refuse to obey him, she thinks. She will accept his implied challenge and set off on her own. [+]But in the next moment, she asks herself: How will she be able to do that?Without her father's support, she cannot hope to survive. And if she herself does not survive, then a child cannot live. " In the end, Anita Shreve's seventh novel is a polished, supremely entertaining variation on Wuthering Heights, with Olympia and Haskell sitting in for Catherine and Heathcliff. The author did some meticulous research for her New England background, which gives this study of one particular wayward woman some extra historical heft. Some readers may find the plot twists a bit pat. And despite Olympia's efforts to be an independent woman, she overcomes her trials largely as a result of her family's wealth and station, which takes the edge off Shreve's feminist message. Still, Fortune's Rocks is a romance in the classic sense of the word and should be enjoyed as such, unless the reader is absolutely allergic to happy endings. -Ted Leventhal.
Publication date: 1992-01-31
Price: £7.99
Review Flaubert's Parrot / Random House Audiobooks:
Creator: Joss Ackland
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2003-04-22
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £12.99
Price: £8.60
Review The Screwtape Letters: Complete and Unabridged / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: Susannah York
Edition: Abridged e.
Publication date: 1995
RRP: £9.50
Price: £11.99
Review Mill on the Floss / Languages & Literature, Inc.:
Creator: Susan Jameson
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-10
RRP: £46.94
Price: £48.93
Review The Blind Years: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Roy Marsden
Publication date: 1986-02
RRP: £36.37
Price: £34.55
Review Cover Her Face: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Anna Massey
Publication date: 2001-04-02
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £10.99
Price: £4.95
Review Miss Garnet's Angel / HarperCollins Audio:There is something very old-fashioned and reassuring about Sally Vickers' novel Miss Garnet's Angel. The themes, self-discovery and redemption have the air of a bygone age, despite the novel being set in contemporary Venice in a world of holiday apartment lets and Pizza Express-funded restoration works. Julia Garnet is a middle-aged woman who has been practising economies of the spirit for years. Hers is a closed-in world, dusty with Marx's theories and when her friend and flatmate of 30 years dies Julia decides to spend the six winter months in Venice to recuperate from her loss. Miss Garnet is a dignified, brusque heroine and Sally Vickers' prose is likewise unruffled and controlled. Miss Garnet's epiphanies are as quiet and subtle as the "oro pallido" (pale gold) light in early Italian Art because, of course, art plays a part in this Venetian tale of emotional reawakening. Julia is moved by the depiction of Raphael in Guardis Tobias and the Angel: "something rusty and hard shifted deep inside Julia Garnet as she stood absorbing the vivid dewy painting and the unmistakable compassion in the angel's bright glance. " She falls in love with Carlo, an art historian with crinkly eyes, white hair and a moustache. There are trials and tribulations to be undergone, Julia must unlearn all her old regimented ways of life, and this brings about heart ache and hurt. However, Vickers handles this with delicate sympathy, giving Julia Garnet a new sensitive view of the world, and the reader a resonant story of transformation. [+]-Eithne Farry.
Creator: Peter Jeffrey
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1995-06-29
RRP: £9.99
Price: £32.75
Review The Rainbow (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: Megan Dodds
Publication date: 2006-10-05
RRP: £9.99
Price: £7.98
Review The Pact / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
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Models & Brands:
A Mind to Murder: Complete & Unabridged, Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: Or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance, Rosie, Gold Mine (Audiobook), Dead Man's Ransom: Complete & Unabridged, Remote Control, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Classic Fiction), Petals on the Wind, The Songlines (Reed Audio), Bugs Life, Some Tame Gazelle: Complete & Unabridged, Fortune's Rocks (Tape), Flaubert's Parrot, The Screwtape Letters: Complete and Unabridged, Mill on the Floss, The Blind Years: Complete & Unabridged, Cover Her Face: Complete & Unabridged, Miss Garnet's Angel, The Rainbow (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics), The Pact |
