A Dark-Adapted Eye
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Narrated by:
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Harriet Walter
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By:
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Barbara Vine
About this listen
Like most families, they had their secrets...
...and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the '50s was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder.
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Successful lady novelist Laura Morland and her boisterous young son, Tony, set off to spend Christmas at her country home in the sleepy surrounds of High Rising. But Laura's wealthy friend and neighbor, George Knox, has taken on a scheming secretary whose designs on marriage to her employer threaten the delicate social fabric of the village.
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Beginning of a journey
- By Jerri C on 11-04-16
By: Angela Thirkell, and others
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Cold Hand in Mine
- By: Robert Aickman
- Narrated by: Reece Shearsmith
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Cold Hand in Mine stands as one of Aickman's best collections and contains eight stories that show off his powers as a 'strange story' writer to the full. The listener is introduced to a variety of characters, from a man who spends the night in a Hospice to a German aristocrat and a woman who sees an image of her own soul. There is also a nod to the conventional vampire story ("Pages from a Young Girl's Journal") but all the stories remain unconventional and inconclusive, which perhaps makes them all the more startling and intriguing.
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Aickman is unique
- By Stark on 08-19-23
By: Robert Aickman
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Half a Lifelong Romance
- A Novel
- By: Eileen Chang
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 15 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Manzhen is a young worker in a Shanghai factory where she meets Shijun, the son of wealthy merchants. Despite family complications, they fall in love and begin to dream of a shared life together - until circumstances force them apart. When they are reunited after many years, can they start their relationship again? Or is it destined to be the romance of only half a lifetime?
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super
- By Marcus Aurelius on 10-05-17
By: Eileen Chang
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The Bad Seed
- By: William March
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?
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loved it
- By CoCo B.M.J on 07-23-19
By: William March
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The Last Summer
- By: Judith Kinghorn
- Narrated by: Jane Wymark
- Length: 13 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Clarissa is almost 17 when the spell of her childhood is broken. It is 1914, the beginning of a blissful, golden summer - and the end of an era. Deyning Park is in its heyday, the large country house filled with the laughter and excitement of privileged youth preparing for a weekend party. When Clarissa meets Tom Cuthbert, home from university and staying with his mother, the housekeeper, she is dazzled.
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The Last Summer Delivers
- By Carmen dela Cruz on 05-22-16
By: Judith Kinghorn
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Staying On
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Paul Shelley
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Story
Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return ‘home’ when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pankot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the days of the Empire. Only the tyranny of their imposing landlady threatens to upset the quiet rhythm of their days.
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A Pleasant Meander
- By Ian C Robertson on 09-22-14
By: Paul Scott
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Bless This House
- By: Norah Lofts
- Narrated by: Michael Tudor Barnes, Nicolette McKenzie
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The house was built in the Old Queen's time: built for an Elizabethan pirate who was knighted for the plunder he brought home. It survived many eras, many reigns: it saw the passing of Cromwell and the Civil War. It became rich with an Indian Nabob and poor with a 20th century innkeeper. It saw wars, and lovers, and death. Children were born there, both heirs and bastards. It had ghosts and legends and a history that grew stranger with every generation.
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Bless This House - my take
- By Kalona1982 on 04-05-09
By: Norah Lofts
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My Real Children
- By: Jo Walton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 2015, and Patricia Cowan is very old. "Confused today," read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know - what year it is, major events in the lives of her children. But she remembers things that don't seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead.
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A strange take on an otherwise simple story.
- By Lauren on 01-08-15
By: Jo Walton
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Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
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Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
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charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
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It is 1905. Asta and her husband, Rasmus, have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over 70 years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter, Ann, to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.
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Confusing, by it could just have been me
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Totally a Ruth Rendell read
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Confusing, by it could just have been me
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Amazing reader elevates book to a higher level
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Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young Member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter–a beautiful, married woman named Hebe–the two become lovers, obsessed with their illicit and adventurous trysts. But when Ivor plans for a surprise daring sexual adventure as a birthday present for Hebe, things take a disastrous turn it's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing.
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Social Crime
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It was a strange, uncertain world that Harriet entered when she married Guy Pringle. Guy taught English at the university at Bucharest, a city of vivid contrasts, where professional beggars exist alongside the excesses of mid-European royalty and expatriate journalists with a taste for truffles and quails in aspic. Underlying this is a fitful awareness of the proximity of the Nazi threat to a Romania which is enjoying an uneasy peace.
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Great book, best audio performance I've heard
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What listeners say about A Dark-Adapted Eye
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- N. K. Marks
- 05-17-20
Amazing Masterpiece Theatre miniseries, book is even better
Classic British mystery with characters to love and love to hate! The mystery unfolds to the reader through the eyes of the intrepid narrator...many twists and turns and the sense of place and time are outstanding!
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- Bonny
- 02-08-15
Well-written, absorbing psychological mystery
I bought this on the basis of audible reviews and was not disappointed. This is not an edge-of-your-seat mystery. It unfolds slowly and moves deeper and deeper into the characters, their histories and their motivations. It is beautifully narrated by Harriet Walter. If you're looking for something to lose yourself in and spend some time with, I recommend it.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Scheri
- 08-04-16
Keep Going
I found the beginning of this book boring but I stayed the course and glad I did.
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- eclectic reader
- 01-10-24
Family history containing murder
Family history containing murder. Only at the end does it become clear who was murderer. The uncertainty of the why: craziness or child taking and that question is left to the reader’s imagination. It is a story of the English countryside in the World War Two era.
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- Jennifer
- 08-20-11
Even better in audio form
This has long been one of my favorite books. I've read it many times and recommended it to many other people. But it has been a few years since I last read it, and the narration, which I listened to while driving to and from NYC is wonderfully excellent.
This book requires a lot of thought, and is a perfect match for the audio format. Having the extra time to really appreciate the subtleties, mysteries, and deep character development is the strength of this format. You'd miss much of this when only reading. The narrator is top knotch, nailing the nuances and exploring the maturation of the main character over time. I can't recommend this one enough.
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22 people found this helpful
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- Tana
- 03-25-15
Winding story.
Love the title. Convoluted. Enticing. Puzzle of characters and events wrought to a final twist.
Wonderful, rich voice of narrator.
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- Yankee Bookworm
- 02-02-17
Top drawer psychological novel
One of my favorite novels of all time. The writing is superb and the chosen narrator is as well. Chills and shivers are no better delivered by situations such as those that can be imagined as real, that are in a sense no more than everyday tragedies. The author also imparts a wonderful sense of time and place. Just read it!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Calliope
- 05-21-15
fascinating family intrigue
This is more an interesting and complicated look at the psychological workings of a family divided than it is a mystery.......though there are and remain several mysterious parts to the whole. It takes a while to get into the story, but as it continually unrolls it is more and more intriguing, drawing the listener deeper and deeper into the family machinations. The continuing family revelations experienced by the protagonist make sense of the title....A "Dark Adapted Eye" can see things that were formerly hidden in the darkness.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Colleen Kellogg
- 06-17-20
Terrific
My first Barbara Vine novel. She also writes under the name Ruth Rendell. I loved it. Beautifully written, some of the best narration In the 100 audible books I have listened to. I'm thrilled to have a new author whose works I can explore.
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1 person found this helpful
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- pamakarma
- 08-14-18
Best of Ruth R endell's (Vines) novels
Depiction of a fascinating, tragic. tale that could probably only have happened at that time and place. In 1940s England-- with a description of place and character as perfect in each detail as. ever done.
The author here is at the height of her power-- which is saying a lot!
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1 person found this helpful