Publication date: 1999-03-01
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £10.99
Price: £4.98
Review Woman's Hour Short Stories: No.5 (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Publication date: 1998-05-20
RRP: £7.99
Price: £6.99
Review Inspector Morse: Infernal Serpent (Mci Talk Tapes) / Music Collection International:
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1999-03-01
Dewey code: 813.54
Price: £44.95
Review Cold Mountain / Random House Audio Publishing Group:Charles Frazier's debut novel, Cold Mountain, is the story of a very long walk. In the waning months of the Civil War, a wounded Confederate veteran named Inman gets up from his hospital bed and begins the long journey back to his home in the remote hills of North Carolina. Along the way he meets rogues and outlaws, Good Samaritans and vigilantes, people who help and others who hinder, but through it all Inman's aim is true: his one goal is to return to Cold Mountain and to Ada, the woman he left behind. The object of his affection, meanwhile, has problems of her own. Raised in the rarified air of Charleston society, Ada was brought to the backwoods of Cold Mountain by her father, a preacher who came to the country for his health. Even after her father's death, Ada remains there, partly to wait for Inman, but partly because she senses her destiny lies not in the city but in the North Carolina Blue Ridge. Cold Mountain is the story of two parallel journeys: Inman's physical trek across the American landscape and Ada's internal odyssey toward an understanding of herself. What makes Frazier's novel so satisfying is the depth of detail surrounding both journeys. Frazier based this story on family history, and in the characters of Inman and Ada he has paid a rich compliment to their historical counterparts. Cold Mountain is, quite simply, a wonderful book.
Creator: Tim Pigott-Smith
Publication date: 1996-05-09
RRP: £9.99
Price: £36.00
Review Enemy of God (Penguin Audiobooks) / Penguin Audiobooks:
Run time: 225 min.
Creator: Julia Ford
Publication date: 1997
Review The Barchester Chronicles- The Small House at Allington / BBC Worldwide Ltd:BBC Radio 4's classic dramatisation of Trolloppe's gently satirical moral tales of provincial life, starring Alex Jennings, Julia Ford and Brenda Blethyn.
Creator: Robert Powell
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1997-07-07
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £11.00
Price: £0.37
Review Captain Corelli's Mandolin (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:Captain Corelli's Mandolin is set in the early days of the second world war, before Benito Mussolini invaded Greece. Dr Iannis practices medicine on the island of Cephalonia, accompanied by his daughter, Pelagia, to whom he imparts much of his healing art. Even when the Italians do invade, life isn't so bad-at first anyway. The officer in command of the Italian garrison is the cultured Captain Antonio Corelli, who responds to a Nazi greeting of "Heil Hitler" with his own "Heil Puccini", and whose most precious possession is his mandolin. It isn't long before Corelli and Pelagia are involved in a heated affair-despite her engagement to a young fisherman, Mandras, who has gone off to join Greek partisans. Love is complicated enough in wartime, even when the lovers are on the same side. And for Corelli and Pelagia, it becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate the minefield of allegiances, both personal and political, as all around them atrocities mount, former friends become enemies and the ugliness of war infects everyone it touches. British author Louis de Bernières is well known for his forays into magical realism in such novels as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. Here he keeps it to a minimum, though certainly the secondary characters with whom he populates his island-the drunken priest, the strongman, the fisherman who swims with dolphins-would be at home in any of his wildly imaginative Latin American fictions. Instead, de Bernières seems interested in dissecting the nature of history as he tells his ever-darkening tale from many different perspectives. [+]Captain Corelli's Mandolin works on many levels, as a love story, a war story and a deconstruction of just what determines the facts that make it into the history books.
Creator: Stephen Mangan
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2001-11-29
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.99
Review The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters / Penguin Audiobooks:
Creator: Kerry Shale
Publication date: 1997-07-31
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £9.99
Price: £25.50
Review The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics) / Penguin Audiobooks:A seminal work of American literature that still commands deep praise and elicits controversy, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought to be lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a fuller understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published.
Creator: Tim Pigott-Smith
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1999-12-10
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £9.99
Price: £8.99
Review Rage / Macmillan Audio Books:
Creator: Geraldine McEwan
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 1993-02-22
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £10.99
Price: £3.97
Review The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie / HarperCollins Audio:
Publication date: 1991-04-30
Price: £7.16
Review Winnie the Pooh / House at Pooh Corner / BBC Audiobooks:
Creator: Terence Allbright
Publication date: 2000-08-07
RRP: £10.99
Price: £21.98
Review A Room with a View: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Diana Quick
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 2000-06
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £53.99
Price: £55.98
Review Falling: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Jamie Glover
Edition: Abridged Ed
Publication date: 2003-09-01
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £10.99
Price: £1.70
Review The Lady and the Unicorn / HarperCollins Audio:If you think you wouldn't raise your skirts for a rakish legend about the purifying powers of a unicorn's horn, then maybe you aren't a 15th-century serving girl under the sway of a velvet-tongued court painter of ill repute. In keeping with her bestselling Girl with a Pearl Earring, and its Edwardian-era follow-up, Falling Angels, Tracy Chevalier's tale of artistic creation and late-medieval amours, The Lady and the Unicorn is a subtle study in social power and the conflicts between love and duty. Nicolas des Innocents has been commissioned by the Parisian nobleman Jean Le Viste to design a series of large tapestries for his great hall (in real life, the famous Lady and the Unicorn cycle, now in Paris's Musee National du Moyen-Age Thermes de Cluny). While Nicolas is measuring the walls, he meets a beautiful girl who turns out to be Jean Le Viste's daughter. Their passion is impossible for their world-so forbidden, given their class differences, that its only avenue of expression turns out to be those magnificent tapestries. The historical evidence on which this story is based is slight enough to allow the full play of Chevalier's imagination in this cleverly woven tale. -Regina Marler, Amazon. com.
Creator: Anthony Donovan
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1995-06
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £8.99
Price: £1.50
Review Classic Chilling Tales: Vol 2 (Classic Fiction) / Naxos AudioBooks:
Publication date: 2000-12-07
RRP: £9.99
Price: £2.49
Review My Legendary Girlfriend / Hodder & Stoughton Ltd:Ever been dumped? No? You're lying. Mike Gayle, previously a contributor to FHM and Just Seventeen magazines has dipped his pen in the inkpot of universal experience and written a comic novel underpinned by rejection and the ripples (or tidal waves) it continues to produce for years afterwards. For exactly three years afterwards in the case of Will Kelly, assigned to the "history" drawer on his 23rd birthday by Aggi, (she of the titular moniker) and who is now undergoing his 26th "celebration" alone in his bedsit in Archway, North London. English teacher, serial smoker and serious list-maker-Will is a Numnul, to quote Gayle; a "New Nineties New Man New Lad", living an existence that screams "Single!". Can you fall in love over the telephone with someone you've never met? Should your best friend sleep with your girlfriend? And just how many presents should a platonic friend send you on your birthday? In real time the novel takes place over a weekend, but in effect it traces a journey that has led to this tumultuous birthday, when Will considers marriage, death, fatherhood and Pot Noodles (but not in that order). Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby are two names that will understandably haunt Mike Gayle, whose prescriptive hero has been dubbed the "male Bridget Jones", but Gayle's book probably owes more to early Martin Amis, soaked as it is in a fever of male self-pity redolent of The Rachel Papers or Success, though without the literary flourishes or darkness. Ultimately My Legendary Girlfriend is pulp fiction for the Pulp generation, an old-fashioned morality tale dressed up as an enjoyable romp that should appeal to lovers of Men Behaving Badly and anyone who has suffered the ignominy of having a Sting song quoted at them to justify a break-up. -David Vincent.
Creator: Bruce Sabath
Publication date: 2004-09-09
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £13.99
Price: £8.60
Review Digital Fortress (Tape) / Orion:
Creator: Juliet Stevenson
Edition: Unabridged
Publication date: 1997-06
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £48.12
Price: £25.99
Review The Beautiful Visit: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Publication date: 1997
Review The Barchester Chronicles- Dr Thorne & Framley Parsonage (BBC Classic Collection) / BBC Worldwide Ltd:BBC Radio 4's classic dramatisation of Trollope's gently satirical moral tales of provincial life continues with the third and fourth novels in the series - Dr Thorne and Framley Parsonage.
Creator: Jenny Agutter
Publication date: 2002-09-26
RRP: £12.99
Price: £1.69
Review Hidden Talents (Tape) / Orion:
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Models & Brands:
Woman's Hour Short Stories: No.5 (BBC Radio Collection), Inspector Morse: Infernal Serpent (Mci Talk Tapes), Cold Mountain, Enemy of God (Penguin Audiobooks), The Barchester Chronicles- The Small House at Allington, Captain Corelli's Mandolin (BBC Radio Collection), The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three Quarters, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Penguin Classics), Rage, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Winnie the Pooh / House at Pooh Corner, A Room with a View: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation (BBC Radio Collection), Falling: Complete & Unabridged, The Lady and the Unicorn, Classic Chilling Tales: Vol 2 (Classic Fiction), My Legendary Girlfriend, Digital Fortress (Tape), The Beautiful Visit: Complete & Unabridged, The Barchester Chronicles- Dr Thorne & Framley Parsonage (BBC Classic Collection), Hidden Talents (Tape) |
