A Glass of Blessings
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Mary Sarah
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By:
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Barbara Pym
About this listen
Barbara Pym's early novel takes us into 1950s England, as seen through the funny, engaging, yearning eyes of a restless housewife.
Wilmet Forsyth is bored. Bored with the everyday routine of her life. Bored with teatimes filled with local gossip. Bored with her husband, Rodney, a civil servant who dotes on her. But on her 33rd birthday, Wilmet's conventional life takes a turn when she runs into the handsome brother of her close friend. Attractive and enigmatic, Piers Longridge is a mystery Wilmet is determined to solve. Rather than settling down, he lived in Portugal, then returned to England for a series of odd jobs. Driven by a fantasy of romance, the sheltered, naïve Englishwoman sets out to seduce Piers - only to discover that he isn't the man she thinks he is.
As cozy as sharing a cup of tea with an old friend, A Glass of Blessings explores timeless themes of sex, marriage, religion, and friendship while exposing our flaws and foibles with wit, compassion, and a generous helping of love.
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Memoir of a Bygone Era
- By Michelle N. Lynch on 04-08-15
By: Margaret Powell
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The Quiet Professor
- By: Betty Neels
- Narrated by: Anne Cater
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Megan thought she had it all - a good job, a caring family and a fiancé whom everyone agreed would make her a wonderful husband. But then her perfectly constructed world fell apart, and she found that her one hope was Professor Jake van Belfeld. He seemed determined to rebuild her life - but why was he taking such a personal interest in her? He couldn't think that her heart needed his attention, too, could he?
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Disappointed
- By Sharon D. Anderson, Ph.D. on 07-02-17
By: Betty Neels
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The Razor's Edge
- By: W. Somerset Maugham
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great War changed everything and everyone, and Larry Darrell is no exception. Though his physical wounds from the war heal, his spirit is changed almost beyond recognition. He leaves his betrothed, the beautiful and devoted Isabel; studies philosophy and religion in Paris; lives as a monk, and witnesses the exotic hardships of Spanish life. All of life that he can find - from an Indian Ashrama to labor in a coal mine - becomes Larry's spiritual experiment as he spurns the comfort and privilege of the Roaring 20s.
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An Classic of Love and the Desire for Meaning
- By Eric on 01-06-17
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Past Imperfect
- By: Julian Fellowes
- Narrated by: Richard Morant
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Damian Baxter is hugely wealthy and dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, England, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern--his fortune in excess of 500 million and who should inherit it on his death.
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Read Snobs instead
- By cristina on 02-14-13
By: Julian Fellowes
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Fraud
- By: Anita Brookner
- Narrated by: Anna Massey
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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When Anna Durrant is reported missing her friends seem unconcerned at her disappearance. After all, her life has been one of concealment. For years Anna submitted to the protective dependence of her mother, and even after Amy Durrant’s death she simply conformed to the expectations of others. Increasingly, Anna feels herself trapped by these expectations.
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Top Shelf Brookner
- By David P on 09-15-15
By: Anita Brookner
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The Secret Adversary & N or M?
- Two Bestselling Agatha Christie Novels in One Great Audiobook
- By: Agatha Christie
- Narrated by: Hugh Fraser
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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From the brilliant pen of Agatha Christie comes two novels featuring the beloved sleuthing duo: In the The Secret Adversary, Tommy and Tuppence decide to embark on a daring business scheme: Young Adventurers Ltd. But they get more than they bargained for when their first assignment for the sinister Mr. Whittington draws them into a diabolical conspiracy. Set during the dark days of World War II, Agatha Christie’s N or M? puts two most unlikely espionage agents, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, on the trail of a pair of Nazi spies who have murdered Britain’s top agent.
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Hugh Fraser is great!
- By Cheryl McInerney on 09-06-22
By: Agatha Christie
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Decline and Fall
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at a boys' private school in Wales. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze.
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Black Humor, Satire, and the Absurd
- By Gypsi on 06-09-18
By: Evelyn Waugh
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The Complete Mapp and Lucia, Volume 1
- By: E. F. Benson
- Narrated by: Georgina Sutton
- Length: 26 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Sharply observant and wickedly funny, E.F. Benson's six Mapp and Lucia novels satirize the upper-middle-class social climbers in 1920s and '30s rural England. Games of bridge and cups of tea fuel hilarious gossip and vindictive plots a-plenty. It is a masterfully sustained spotlight on the minutiae of village life - a clever and ultimately heart-warming series that seems tailor-made for audio. Volume 1 contains the first three books.
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At last!
- By Grace M-T on 06-15-21
By: E. F. Benson
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Grey Mask
- Miss Silver, Book 1
- By: Patricia Wentworth
- Narrated by: Diana Bishop
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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The first of the classic mysteries featuring governess-turned-detective Miss Silver, who investigates a deadly conspiratorial ring. Charles Moray has come home to England to collect his inheritance. After four years wandering the jungles of India and South America, the hardy young man returns to the manor of his birth, where generations of Morays have lived and died. Strangely, he finds the house unlocked, and sees a light on in one of its abandoned rooms. Eavesdropping, he learns of a conspiracy to commit a fearsome crime.
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The shaky first of a long, strong series
- By Phebe on 07-21-15
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Brideshead Revisited
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated work is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the story mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh.
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Extraordinary
- By Vieux Carré Blonde on 12-12-12
By: Evelyn Waugh
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Catherine Oliphant writes for women's magazines and lives comfortably with anthropologist Tom Mallow - although she's starting to wonder if they'll ever get married. Then Tom drops his bombshell: He's leaving her for a 19-year-old student. Though stunned by Tom's betrayal, Catherine quickly becomes fascinated by another anthropologist, Alaric Lydgate, a reclusive eccentric recently returned from Africa. As Catherine starts to weigh her options, she must figure out who she is and what she really wants.
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Terrible narrator for a wonderful book
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Great book, terrible reader
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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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Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates were close friends at Oxford University, but now live very different lives. Forty-one-year-old Jane lives in the country, is married to a vicar, has a daughter she adores, and lives a very proper life in a very proper English parish. Prudence, a year shy of 30, lives in London, has an office job, and is self-sufficient and fiercely independent - until Jane decides her friend should be married. Jane has the perfect husband in mind for her former pupil: a widower named Fabian Driver.
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Ruined by narrator
- By TX lilbit on 07-27-20
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After being jilted by her fiance, Dulcie Mainwaring despairs of ever finding true love. For a distraction, she goes to a publishing conference, where she meets Viola Dace, a dramatic woman who refuses to live without romance, as well as Aylwin Forbes, an editor whom Viola adores. The fact that Aylwin is married doesn't stop Viola. When her amorous pursuit prompts Aylwin's wife to leave him, the academic heartthrob is wide open to Viola's romantic attentions. That is, until Dulcie's 18-year-old niece moves in with Viola, and the young girl soon catches Aylwin's roving eye.
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Narration fails Barbara Pym’s story and wit
- By Amazon Customer on 06-24-20
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Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret.
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I felt a lot of empathy towards the excellently developed characters.
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Terrible narrator for a wonderful book
- By Penny G. on 04-23-20
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Great book, terrible reader
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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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- By Sara on 04-13-16
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Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates were close friends at Oxford University, but now live very different lives. Forty-one-year-old Jane lives in the country, is married to a vicar, has a daughter she adores, and lives a very proper life in a very proper English parish. Prudence, a year shy of 30, lives in London, has an office job, and is self-sufficient and fiercely independent - until Jane decides her friend should be married. Jane has the perfect husband in mind for her former pupil: a widower named Fabian Driver.
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Ruined by narrator
- By TX lilbit on 07-27-20
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After being jilted by her fiance, Dulcie Mainwaring despairs of ever finding true love. For a distraction, she goes to a publishing conference, where she meets Viola Dace, a dramatic woman who refuses to live without romance, as well as Aylwin Forbes, an editor whom Viola adores. The fact that Aylwin is married doesn't stop Viola. When her amorous pursuit prompts Aylwin's wife to leave him, the academic heartthrob is wide open to Viola's romantic attentions. That is, until Dulcie's 18-year-old niece moves in with Viola, and the young girl soon catches Aylwin's roving eye.
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What listeners say about A Glass of Blessings
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- julia de vos
- 06-28-20
My favorite author
I’ve loved Barbara Pym for years. Excellent Women is my favorite, and I pleaded with Audible to find or make more Pym audio recordings. Imagine my delight when I found several recently. I used all my points to purchase the new Pym recordings. I had listened to a sample if Mary Sarah reading one or two and was concerned about her fake British breathy, oddly-phrased reading. Mary Sarah comes VERY close to making these recordings unlistenable— she’s absolutely horrible. I’ll try to persist as any other recordings are nearly impossible to obtain. But I must ask Mary, would finding out how the British pronounce “mass” be so difficult ?
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12 people found this helpful
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- Holly
- 06-13-20
Delightful, absorbing and insightful
Insightful and charming, another wonderful Barbara Pym novel, that so accurately reflects a time, place and strata in post WWII England. One of her very talented attributes is the seamless and usually very funny, or at a minimum, highly interesting, inclusion of small subplots and minor characters. The minor characters and their situation are highly memorable and absorbing. An example in this novel is the minor characters associated with St. Luke's, such as the young man obsessed with his car. One aspect I love about this novel is that the author's portrait of the main character is affectionate...in the hands of a less subtle novelist, she would probably be vilified and ruined. Highly recommended.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Carolyn
- 09-28-24
Brilliant Barbra Pym; Perfect narrator
Barbra Pym's subtle, ironic, insightful comedies of manners are often just exactly what I need to read. Mary Sarah narrates this beautifully, adding her own measure to the art.
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- Penny G.
- 08-04-20
Terrible narrator for a wonderful book!
Once again, I found the narrator terrible and I can’t imagine why she was hired to narrate these wonderful Barbara Pym books.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Reckoning
- 01-18-24
Read it anyway. It’s PYM!! No narrator can destroy this stuff. . 
Well, it’s Pym. No one else wrote this kind of deceptively simple, gentle books. There’s an edge beneath the tea—amazingly subtle.
Ok. The narrator isn’t the best. Read it anyway. It’s Pym!
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- Ellen M Wallerstedt
- 11-04-23
Re-recording needed desperately
I adore the novels by Barbara Pym. I’ve read my copies over and over until they’re falling apart. After listening to Excellent Women on Audible ,which was delightful,I purchased all of the others. The reader is so ghastly it’s painful. What a bitter disappointment. I can only imagine what the extraordinarily talented Miss Pym would say.
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- uptowngirl
- 10-12-20
A great novelist butchered by a terrible narrator
Audible has got to be the cheapest outfit for around. How dare they hire of someone as untalented as Mary Sarah Thomas better known for soft points and bodice rippers, To read one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century? I'm sure she came cheap because she's American and is using a phony English accent which is so terrible I almost threw my phone against the wall the 4th time she said "chopp-ter" to introduce the next chapter. Really appalling. Common words are mispronounced as well. Clearly there was no editing or oversight for this piece of garbage.
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13 people found this helpful
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- agatha christie
- 03-12-21
a blessing
enjoyed this book,both reading and listening on Audiobooks. Really a blessing.Barbara Pym I can enjoy always.Trulely a delight.
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- Lisa Miller
- 09-18-22
Narration dreadful
The narration ruins one of my favorite books. I love all Barbara Pym books and I could not finish this. I join in the pleas to re-record these wonderful books with a decent narrator.
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- Leonie
- 01-21-21
Terrible Accent
Fabulous novel. I had to switch off as the accent was so poor. Disappointed unfortunately.
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9 people found this helpful