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Audiobooks Narrated by Richard Brown
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Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works by day in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. Gordon has published a slim volume of verse and is determined to keep free of the "money world" of safe, lucrative jobs, marriage, and family responsibilities. This world, to Gordon, spells the end of art and aspidistra, the homely, indestructible house plant that stands in every middle-class British window.
Gordon's sweetheart, Rosemary, understands him: she is patient with his pride and lack of funds. But then, as it happens with all lovers, events overtake them.
Orwell's picture of the "money world," as Gordon sees it, is in his best satirical vein.
"Gritty, growling, commonsensical and touching. [Orwell] never wrote a basically kinder or more human novel."-Time
George Bowling, an insurance salesman, hits middle age and feels impelled to "come up for air" from his life of quiet desperation. With seventeen pounds he has won at a race, he steals a vacation from his wife and family and pays a visit to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. But the pool is gone, Lower Binfield has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of Bowling's holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.
Bowling's everyman life provides a sort of cavalcade of England from 1893 to 1938. Written when the clouds of World War II were already gathering, this story of Bowling's journey into his own and his country's past is told with humor, warmth, and nostalgia that will surprise and delight George Orwell's many readers.
Originally published in 1938, Graham Greene's chilling expos' of violence and gang warfare is a masterpiece of psychological realism and often considered Graham Greene's best novel. It is a fascinating study of evil, sin, and the 'appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,' a classic of its kind.
Set in Brighton, England, among the criminal rabble, the book depicts the tragic career of a seventeen-year-old boy named Pinkie whose primary ambition is to lead a gang to rival that of the wealthy and established Colleoni. Pinkie is devoid of compassion or human feeling, despising weakness of the spirit or of the flesh. Responsible for the razor slashes that killed Kite and also for the death of Hale, he is the embodiment of calculated evil. As a Catholic, however, he is convinced that his retribution does not lie in human hands.
He is therefore not prepared for Ida Arnold, Hale's avenging angel. Ida, whose allegiance is with life, the here and now, has her own ideas about the circumstances surrounding Hale's death. For the sheer joy of it she takes up the challenge of bringing the infernal Pinkie to an earthly kind of justice.
When finished, the listener is sure to ponder some lofty moral issues to which Greene, a Catholic writer, withholds easy judgments.
'In a class by himself'the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety.''William Golding, Nobel Prize'winning author
One of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union, this is the story of labor camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov and his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of Communist oppression. Based on the author's own experience in the gulags, where he spent nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory remarks against Stalin, the novel is an unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps.
"Richard Brown's razor-sharp narration perfectly suits this fine translation."-"-Library Journal
Against the backdrop of the violent partition of India and Pakistan, this volume sketches one last bittersweet romance, revealing the divided loyalties of the British as they flee, retreat from, or cling to India.
The first volume in Paul Scott's historical tour-de-force opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for self-rule. In the Mayapore gardens, Daphne Manners, daughter of the provincial governor, leaves her Indian lover, who will soon be arrested for her alleged rape.
The second novel in The Raj Quartet: the arrest by British police of Mohammed Ali Kasim, who is known to sympathise with the Quit India movement, signifies a further deterioration in Anglo-India relations.
For families such as the Laytons, who have lived and served in India for generations, the immediate social and political realities are both disturbing and tragic. With growing confusion and bewilderment, the British are forced to confront the violent and often brutal years that lie ahead.
This volume follows the fates of the Laytons and a retired missionary teacher, all of whom can foresee the end of the Raj--and both welcome and lament its passing.
In this sequel to The Raj Quartet, Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status. Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.
Staying On won the Booker Prize and was made into a motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in 1979.
For more than four thousand years, the Middle East has provided a setting for titanic struggles between great civilizations and religions. In the twentieth century it became the focus of rivalry between the European powers as the last major Islamic empire of the Ottoman Turks crumbled and collapsed. The discovery of the world's greatest oil reserves gave the region global economic importance as well as a unique strategic value.
In this masterly work of synthesis, Peter Mansfield draws on his experience as a journalist and historian to form a picture of the political and social history of the meeting point of Occident and Orient over the last two centuries, from Bonaparte's marauding invasion of Egypt to the start of the Gulf War. In two penetrating final chapters, Peter Mansfield discusses Saddam Hussein and the prospects for the future.
In the second of his three-volume biography, Manchester challenges the assumption that Churchill's finest hour was as a wartime leader. During the years 1932-1940, Churchill stood almost alone against Nazi aggression and the British and French pusillanimous policy of appeasement.
"Manchester is not only a master of detail but also of 'the big picture'....I daresay most Americans reading The Last Lion will relish it immensely."-National Review
This second volume in William Manchester's three-volume biography of Winston Churchill challenges the assumption that Churchill's finest hour was as a wartime leader. During the years 1932-1940, he was tested as few men are. Pursued by creditors (at one point he had to put up his home for sale), he remained solvent only by writing an extraordinary number of books and magazine articles. He was disowned by his own party, dismissed by the BBC and Fleet Street and the social and political establishments as a warmonger, and twice nearly lost his seat in Parliament. Churchill stood almost alone against Nazi aggression and the British and French pusillanimous policy of appeasement.
Manchester tracks with new insights this complex, fascinating history without ever losing sight of Churchill the man, a man whose vision was global and whose courage was boundless.
