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A Tale of Two Cities
- Narrated by: Martin Jarvis
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
Exclusively from Audible
'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'; so the recording begins and ends with some of Dickens' best-known words, and between those lines is every Briton's view of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the audiobook tells the story of a French doctor who is imprisoned for 18 years in the Bastille in Paris. Upon his release, he moves to London with his daughter, Lucie, whom he had never met. She marries but there is conflict between her husband and the people who decades earlier caused her father's imprisonment.
Set against the backdrop of the conditions that led up to the French Revolution, it depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralised by the French aristocracy and the brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror, towards the former aristocrats.
Dickens was one of eight children from a very poor family, with his father eventually being sent to debtor's prison. Dickens began work at the age of 12 to help clear the family debt. It was this troublesome childhood that provided him with much of the material for his novels and lent him a sympathetic voice for the poor.
Narrator Biography
Martin Jarvis is one of Britain's most admired actors. His audiobook output is legendary. He is described in Vanity Fair as 'the Olivier of audiobooks' and 'genius of the Spoken Word' in the LA Times. Award-winning recordings range from titles by Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse and Michael Frayn to thrillers by Jeffrey Archer, Wilbur Smith, Ian Fleming and Dick Francis.
He has starred in many acclaimed West End and National Theatre productions and received the Theatre World Award as Jeeves on Broadway. Numerous UK television appearances encompass Law & Order, Doctor Who, Endeavour, Inspector Morse and The Forsyte Saga. In America: Murder She Wrote, Numb3rs, Cosmos and Walker, Texas Ranger. Films include Titanic, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Wreck-It Ralph. Videogames: Alfred in Batman, Finn McMissile in Cars. Martin was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
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Set in the world of the Victorian professional and landed classes, the story centres on Mr Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity who is nevertheless in possession of an income from a charity far in excess of the sum devoted to it.
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a delight
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Lady Audley's Secret
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A fast-paced Victorian thriller that will delight audiences today as it did 100 years ago, Lady Audley's Secret has subterfuge, kidnapping, jealousy, and fraud, all thrown into the mix and shaken up for good measure.
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Narrator creates the listen
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Felix Holt, The Radical
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Relinquishing thoughts of a materially rewarding life, the respectably educated Felix Holt returns to his native village in North Loamshire and becomes an artisan. He is a forceful young man of honor, integrity, and idealism, burning to participate in political life so that he may improve the lot of his fellow artisans.
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four and a half stars
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The Club
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
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The Bondwoman's Narrative
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An unprecedented historical and literary event, this tale written in the 1850s is the only known novel by a female African American slave, and quite possibly the first novel written by a black woman anywhere. A work recently uncovered by renowned scholar and professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., it is a stirring tale of "passing" and the adventures of a young slave as she makes her way to freedom.
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Poor reading of an important book
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Charlotte Brontë
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Charlotte Brontë's life contained all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. Like Jane Eyre, she was raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors and sent away to a brutally strict boarding school at a young age. Charlotte grew up and watched helplessly as, one by one, her five beloved siblings sickened and died; by the end of her short life, she was the only child of the Brontë clan remaining.
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Clear-Eyed Bio of Literature's Most Elusive Figure
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Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill-treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters.
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More than Lovely
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The Good Soldier
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On the face of it Captain Edward Ashburnham's life was unimpeachable. But behind the mask where passion seethes, the captain's "good" life was rotting away.
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Treachery in the Troops
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Excellent!
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Between his work on the 2014 Audible Audiobook of the Year, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel, and his performance of Classic Love Poems, narrator Richard Armitage ( The Hobbit, Hannibal) has quickly become a listener favorite. Now, in this defining performance of Charles Dickens' classic David Copperfield, Armitage lends his unique voice and interpretation, truly inhabiting each character and bringing real energy to the life of one of Dickens' most famous characters.
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A PERFECT narration of an English classic!
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What listeners say about A Tale of Two Cities
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Doug
- 08-10-07
Enchanting, inspiring, exciting
One needs some patience to get used to Dickens' style in the early parts of this wonderful book, but listening to the audio helps make the story understandable. And like so many of life's treasures that require work before reward, this story pays off the patient reader in the end with emotional and intellectual paybacks that top all books I know of except possibly Les Miserables. My first attempst to read the book led nowhere, but finally I listened to the audio and read the book at the same time (more or less) and I got hooked into a book that I rank as one of the two best fiction works I have ever read (and I am a teacher of English with 30 years experience, and a bookworm too...) I have now read and listened to the book about ten times and I plan to revisit it again, at least every two years....it is too good to ignor.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Wiregrass18
- 07-31-11
What a joy!
Listening to Dickens with such wonderful narration by Martin Jarvis is a complete joy. I enjoyed it forty years ago and loved it again with this listening.
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Overall
- Howard
- 01-05-10
Fabulous
Probably the finest tragic romance written in the English language superbly rendered into the audio format. Six stars.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Thomas
- 05-06-17
Martin Jarvis's delivery makes this the best audio version.
Martin Jarvis's delivery makes this the best audio version of Tale of Two Cities. With a work that's been so frequently reproduced the reader is the relevant variable and Jarvis is the best.
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- Ilie B.
- 11-14-24
Great story!
A tale of two cities is really a very interesting story of fate and history.
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Overall
- Guy
- 08-01-06
Great classic...
I tried to listen to this on CD a few years ago, but I would find my attention wandering. I gave it another try, and I'm glad I did. The narrator is wonderful, and this is a book I will listen to again in the future.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Mark
- 11-08-16
Exceptional
Amazing book - it was intense, terrifying, while at the same time it was one of the most poignant books I have ever read. And in the end it was uplifting. Many times, the classics are not really classic but rather they are just books that were written long ago. This one truly is classic. The narration by Martin Jarvis is wonderful. The pitiful situations that the characters all endure is terribly sad and gives some insight into the actions they all take at the pivotal moment in the book. Dickens probably truly cared about humanity and the human situation.
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- Caleb
- 05-19-16
I'll want to go back and read it
The story is great and the performance is excellent. If you want to listen to A Tale of Two Cities, I'd recommend listening to this version. However, I had never read the book on paper, and now I think that I will. It's rather long and can be a bit convoluted. Not in a bad way at all, just that I would have liked to have been able to go back a few pages or chapters and refreshed myself on who a character was or what event the narrator was referencing. Of course, this is a trade-off for any audiobook. I just think AToTC is just worth going back over more than others sometimes are.
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- Robin Phillips
- 03-29-20
Truly and amazing story!!
This is one of the best books I have ever read. Charles Dickens writes in an amazing way, and the story is just as amazing. The characters you are supposed to love you love a lot, and the characters you are supposed to hate couldn't be worse.
Martin Jarvis does an amazing job of bringing this story to life.
I just finished it and I can say that it's one of my favourite books. Ps. I cried at the end
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- Robert
- 10-26-09
Stick With It
It took me a while to finish this novel, and I actually listed to several other audio books before coming back to it. If you stick with it to the end you really do begin to care about what will happen to the characters.
The narration is excellent although sometimes a bit quick. Which can lead to wanting to replay certain sections for more clarity about what is actually happening.
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1 person found this helpful