Helena
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Narrated by:
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Simon Prebble
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By:
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Evelyn Waugh
About this listen
Helena is the intelligent, horse-mad daughter of a British chieftain who is suddenly betrothed to the warrior who becomes the Roman emperor Constantius. She spends her life seeking truth in the religions, mythologies, and philosophies of the declining ancient world. This she eventually finds in Christianity - and literally in the Cross of Christ.
The Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, made the historic pilgrimage to Palestine, found pieces of wood from the true Cross, and built churches at Bethlehem and Olivet. Her life coincided with one of the great turning-points of history: the recognition of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. The enormous conflicting forces of the age, and the corruption, treachery, and madness of Imperial Rome, combine to give Evelyn Waugh the theme for one of his most arresting and memorable works.
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Thurstan, a young Norman and would-be Knight at the Court of King Roger in Palermo, has been in love since boyhood with Lady Alicia, now returned a widow from the Holy Land. Thurstan soon finds himself caught in a tangle of plots.
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A Well-Earned Five Stars for this Gem
- By Ilana on 12-11-14
By: Barry Unsworth
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Mark Twain - The Complete Novels
- By: Mark Twain
- Narrated by: Lee Howard
- Length: 58 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Here you will find the complete novels of Mark Twain: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Starts at Chapter 1, 2. The Prince and the Pauper Starts at Chapter 37, 3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Starts at Chapter 70, 4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Starts at Chapter 113, 5. The American Claimant Starts at Chapter 158, 6. Tom Sawyer Abroad Starts at Chapter 184, 7. Pudd'nhead Wilson Starts at Chapter 197, 8. Tom Sawyer, Detective Starts at Chapter 219, 9. A Horse's Tale Starts at Chapter 230, 10. The Mysterious Stranger Starts at Chapter 245.
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Content; GREAT! Performance.. .not so much😁
- By brian deis on 01-09-20
By: Mark Twain
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Hand of Isis
- By: Jo Graham
- Narrated by: Gigi Shane
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
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Charmian is handmaiden to Cleopatra. She is also an oracle, gifted with ancient memories that may hold the key to preserving Egypt. Through blood and fire, war and peace, love and death, she will face a desperate struggle that will remake the future of the world.
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Reader does not know how to pronounce words
- By Gail N. on 07-31-19
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The King’s Gambit
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- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 7 hrs and 8 mins
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In this Edgar Award-nominated mystery, John Maddox Roberts takes listeners back to a Rome filled with violence and evil. Vicious gangs ruled the streets of Crassus and Pompey, routinely preying on plebeian and patrician alike. So the garroting of a lowly ex-slave and the disembowelment of a foreign merchant in the dangerous Subura district seemed of little consequence to the Roman hierarchy.
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Great start to a series
- By P. Johnson on 09-21-17
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Ramses
- The Son Of Light
- By: Christian Jacq
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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An epic re-creation of the exhilarating and mysterious time when the Sun King ruled Egypt, Ramses, the Son of Light, has become the rage in France. With over two million copies sold, it is the greatest publishing phenomenon to hit the shelves there in 20 years. Rameses is only 14 when his father, the Pharaoh Seti, begins testing his true mettle. Being the younger of two sons, the proud Ramses has a problem with being relegated to second place.
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Teenager drama with little insight into Egyptian culture
- By Consuelo on 10-24-17
By: Christian Jacq
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Brideshead Revisited
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
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Performance
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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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In the Name of the Family
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Dunant
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
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It is 1502, and Rodrigo Borgia, a self-confessed womanizer and master of political corruption, is now on the papal throne as Alexander VI. His daughter Lucrezia, age 22 - already three times married and a pawn in her father's plans - is discovering her own power. And then there is his son Cesare Borgia, brilliant, ruthless, and increasingly unstable; it is his relationship with Machiavelli that gives the Florentine diplomat a master class in the dark arts of power and politics.
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One of the best historical fiction novels
- By GrandmaNurseHeather on 04-13-17
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The Course of Honour
- By: Lindsey Davis
- Narrated by: Diana Bishop
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
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He has no money, no reputation and no famous ancestors.' The love story of the Emperor Vespasian, who brought peace to Rome after years of strife, and his mistress, the freed slave woman Caenis, this book recreates Ancient Rome's most turbulent period - the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero and Vespasian's rise to power. As their forbidden romance blossoms, Caenis is embroiled in political intrigue, while Vespasian embarks on a glorious career.
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Great love story
- By Julie on 05-04-20
By: Lindsey Davis
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The Seven Wonders
- A Novel of the Ancient World
- By: Steven Saylor
- Narrated by: Stephen Plunkett
- Length: 12 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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USA Today hails Steven Saylor as a “modern master of historical fiction.” Rich in intrigue and period detail, his novels set in ancient Rome have garnered acclaim the world over. A prequel to his epic Roma Sub Rosa series, The Seven Wonders follows series star Gordianus the Finder as an 18-year-old traveling the Mediterranean to witness the wonders of that fabled age. At each stop, the young investigator finds a beguiling mystery that pushes his powers of deduction to the limit.
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Interesting History, Not much of a story
- By Mark on 08-10-12
By: Steven Saylor
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Hannay: His 5 Adventures
- By: John Buchan
- Narrated by: Graham Scott
- Length: 49 hrs and 49 mins
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In The Thirty-Nine Steps, Hannay struggles to thwart an assassination plot designed to hasten war between Britain and Germany. Later he is plucked from the trenches first, in Greenmantle, to frustrate a plot to ferment an uprising in the Islamic world; and then, in Mr. Standfast, to undertake a vital secret mission against a German spy ring operating among pacifist elements in England. After the war, his adventures continue in The Three Hostages; and then in The Island of Sheep, when an old oath to protect the son of a friend from his days in Africa draws him into new danger.
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Values of a bygone era
- By Barbara on 03-16-24
By: John Buchan
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A book of brilliant entertainments: 39 stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, "a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters" ( Time).
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MORE than actual print book!
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The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece - an audiobook that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities.
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What listeners say about Helena
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Spalding Drive
- 10-01-23
Best of Waugh
I love Evelyn Waugh’s books and style. This is my favorite as it is a story of the searcher who has hope till the day she dies.
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- Brian Abel Ragen
- 01-08-23
Waugh’s Historical novel.
Those who enjoy Robert Graves “I, Claudius” and C.S. Lewis’s “Till We Have Faces” will find this novel very interesting.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Mary Beth Juday
- 11-05-24
Wonderful imagining of an historical episode
I loved the book. And I did enjoy the narration as I have the other books I have listened to that Simon Preble has narrated
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- Joseph M. Wilson
- 07-02-22
good combination of history and imagination
Recommended for anyone wanting a creative way to imagine what this remarkable woman must have been like!
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2 people found this helpful
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- John
- 04-19-19
And There Alone is Hope
I was curious to see how Waugh would handle this challenging subject matter, so seemingly outside his usual ken, the world of Basil Seal and Charles Ryder. Of course, it’s really the same world, the same grapple between blindness and seeing, darkness and light, fashion and fundamentals.
One critic I read sees humor—a satirizing humor, but humor nonetheless—throughout the book. I know what he means, but the attitudes and fashions being satirized were just a wee bit too familiar for me to smile much. When the Aryan bishop Eusebius holds forth on the goings-on at the Council of Nicaea, I spent most of my time cringing:
“All that invoking of the Holy Ghost put things on the wrong footing. It was purely a question of practical convenience… I mean, we must have progress.”
Constantine’s edict making Christianity the official religion of the empire also made it fashionable. And in Helena’s day that meant Gnosticism, a creed that eschewed physical reality in favor of airy theory. Ironically, Helena’s inbred skepticism leads her to faith. Like Doubting Thomas, she wants to touch the physical reality of Christ. It’s an attitude that’s easy to dismiss; indeed, Christ Himself rebukes Thomas when He speaks of the blessedness of those who have not seen and yet believe. Yet beneath that need to touch and feel there lurks, I think, a faith that there actually is something there to touch and feel. Like the reality of the True Presence that lead me and my wife—Thomas and Helena-like—to conversion, this yearning for the physical reality of Christ led Helena to find what everyone around her said could never be found.
As with every book I’ve listened to narrated by Simon Prebble, I started out wondering if he was really the perfect voice pick and ended by realizing he was.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Michelle
- 09-13-19
Needed a female narrator.
The narrator did a superb job, but this was a book that, in my opinion, required a female narrator.
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3 people found this helpful