Hurry on Down
Valancourt 20th Century Classics, Book 1
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Narrated by:
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Hannibal Hills
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By:
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John Wain
About this listen
Charles Lumley feels that he has been born in captivity - the captivity of his smugly conventional bourgeois upbringing. Now he has just graduated from university, only to make the discouraging discovery that his education has rendered him unfit for any kind of useful employment. Wondering what to do with the rest of his life and longing to escape, a chance remark overheard in a pub sets him off on a picaresque and hilarious tour of 1950s Britain. He undergoes a string of comic misadventures as he works as a window cleaner, a drug trafficker, a hospital orderly, and a chauffeur, all while trying to find his place in the world and win the love of the beautiful Veronica Roderick.
John Wain (1925-1994) was one of the great English men of letters of the 20th century, a prolific novelist, poet, biographer, and critic whose many accolades included the Somerset Maugham Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Whitbread Award. Hurry on Down (1953), his first novel, ushered in a new kind of English novel and paved the way for many later classics, including Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (1954), and John Braine's Room at the Top (1957).
©2013 John Wain (P)2021 Valancourt Books LLCListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Polly has two sets of memories.... One is normal: school, home, friends. The other, stranger memories begin nine years ago, when she was 10 and gate-crashed an odd funeral in the mansion near her grandmother's house. Polly's just beginning to recall the sometimes marvelous, sometimes frightening adventures she embarked on with Tom Lynn after that. And then she did something terrible, and everything changed. But what did she do? Why can't she remember? Polly must uncover the secret, or her true love - and perhaps Polly herself - will be lost.
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Finally!!!
- By Jamie D. on 07-10-21
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Life for Sale
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Kotaro Watanabe
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. Soon interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests and what follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots - even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself enmeshed in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the crosshairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime syndicate.
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Book is good - Narration is just terrible
- By Vyacheslav Varlakov on 03-12-21
By: Yukio Mishima
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The Bermondsey Bookshop
- By: Mary Gibson
- Narrated by: Anne Dover
- Length: 13 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in 1920s London, this is the inspiring story of Kate Goss' struggle against poverty, hunger and cruel family secrets. Her mother died in a fall, her father has vanished without trace, and now her aunt and cousins treat her viciously. In a freezing, vermin-infested garret, factory girl Kate has only her own brave spirit and dreams of finding her father to keep her going. She has barely enough money to feed herself, or to pay the rent. The factory where she works begins to lay off people and it isn't long before she has fallen into the hands of the violent local money-lender.
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A glimpse into the past
- By Luci-Lu on 10-27-21
By: Mary Gibson
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The Shadow Lines
- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Raj Varma
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Opening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Ghosh’s radiant second novel follows two families - one English, one Bengali - as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian-born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.
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Narrator Doesn't Know How to Pronounce
- By Amazon Customer on 08-27-11
By: Amitav Ghosh
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Richard E. Grant
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life.
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Gordon's Grey World is Colored with Grant
- By Timothy on 09-25-11
By: George Orwell
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Anthem
- By: Ayn Rand
- Narrated by: B. J. Harrison
- Length: 2 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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“It is a sin to write this. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. It is base and evil.” Deep issues of conscience are explored in Ayn Rand’s dystopian tale of a man who dares to fight against a system that invades his very mind and identity.
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Triumphant! A beautiful molding of the mind.
- By Kari on 02-17-16
By: Ayn Rand
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Pietr the Latvian
- Inspector Maigret, Book 1
- By: Georges Simenon, David Bellos - translator
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.
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Long live Maigret
- By Adeliese Baumann on 11-19-14
By: Georges Simenon, and others
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Dolphin Junction
- Stories
- By: Mick Herron
- Narrated by: David Thorpe, Emma Powell, Gerard Doyle, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Now, for the first time, Herron’s short fiction has been collected into one volume. In Dolphin Junction, devoted fans and future converts alike will find much to amuse, delight, and terrify them. Five stand-alone nerve-racking and thrilling crime fiction stories are complemented by four mystery stories featuring the Oxford wife-and-husband detective team of shrewd Zoë Boehm and hapless Joe Silvermann. The collection also includes a peek into the past of Jackson Lamb, irascible top agent at Slough House.
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Wicked treats
- By A+A on 11-24-21
By: Mick Herron
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Something New
- By: P. G. Wodehouse
- Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Here, we have a glorious ensemble of Woodhousian characters knocking elbows to foreheads in the elegant and grand Blandings Castle. Meet Freddy Threepwood, the vagrant son of doddering old Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle. Freddy has recently become engaged to Aline Peters, the American heiress of an irascible father. The snag is that Freddy seems to have at one point become enamored of a struggling actress, Joan Valentine, and written some impetuous and imprudent letters to her.
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Same book as Something Fresh
- By customer on 03-07-15
By: P. G. Wodehouse
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Maurice
- By: E. M. Forster
- Narrated by: Peter Firth
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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'Ah for darkness...not the darkness of a house which coops up a man among furniture, but the darkness where he can be free!' Maurice Hall knows he must choose between living life in the shadows or denying himself a chance at love and fulfilment. Aware of his attraction to the same sex, in a time where it was considered unlawful and immoral to have homosexual desires, Maurice must decide whether to battle or submit to a prejudiced 20th-century English society.
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Finally!!! It's past time!
- By Christopher P. on 11-18-10
By: E. M. Forster
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The Charioteer
- By: Mary Renault
- Narrated by: Joe Jameson
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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After surviving the Dunkirk retreat, Laurie Odell, a young homosexual, critically examines his unorthodox lifestyle and personal relationships, as he falls in love with a young conscientious objector and becomes involved with a circle of world-weary gay men.
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A Gay Classic!
- By Christopher on 02-05-16
By: Mary Renault