Prague Spring
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Narrated by:
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Ralph Lister
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By:
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Simon Mawer
About this listen
New York Times best-selling author Simon Mawer returns to Czechoslovakia, this time during the turbulent 1960s, with a suspenseful story of sex, politics, and betrayal.
In the summer of 1968, the year of the Prague Spring with a Cold War winter, Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe, complicating a budding friendship that could be something more. Having reached Southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world.
Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, first secretary at the British embassy in Prague, observes developments in the country with a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Koneckova, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, with all its hopes and new ideas; now, nothing seems off-limits behind the Iron Curtain. But the great wheels of politics are grinding in the background; Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek, and the Red Army is massing on the borders.
This shrewd, engrossing, and sensual novel once again proves Simon Mawer is one of today's most talented writers of historical spy fiction.
©2018 Simon Mawer (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Too close to the truth?
- By carl801 on 11-24-07
By: Robert Harris
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Duet
- By: Kimberley Freeman
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From the London pop scene, to the opera stages of Europe; from a tiny Greek island, to a stifling manor house full of secrets and deceptions; from the sun-drenched Queensland coast, to the silent outback; Angela and Ellie are two women both looking for something. One in search of her identity and her memory; the other in search of the love that she had and lost; theirs is a duet whose last note will not be sung until the heart-stopping climax, when a shadow from the past returns to claim them both.
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Gosh that was a great story!
- By Anonymous User on 06-10-09
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Down Cemetery Road
- By: Mick Herron
- Narrated by: Julia Franklin
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead.
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A bit of a slog....
- By rhl60 on 01-26-24
By: Mick Herron
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The Splendour Falls
- By: Susanna Kearsley
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Emily Braden has stopped believing in fairy tales and happy endings. When her fascinating but unreliable cousin Harry invites her on a holiday to explore the legendary town of Chinon, and promptly disappears - well, that's Harry for you. As Emily makes the acquaintance of Chinon and its people, she begins to uncover dark secrets beneath the charm.
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Odd story with a worse narration
- By MV on 01-18-14
By: Susanna Kearsley
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Single & Single
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: Michael Jayston
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.
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The spy who came back to the bank
- By Darwin8u on 03-12-14
By: John le Carré
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Asylum
- By: Patrick McGrath
- Narrated by: Sir Ian McKellen
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.
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So enjoyed this book!
- By Mebythesea on 10-07-08
By: Patrick McGrath
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The Swimming Pool Library
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Samuel West
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This novel centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.
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Strong stuff
- By Peregrine on 05-15-11
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The Seventh Function of Language
- By: Laurent Binet, Sam Taylor - translator
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies - struck by a laundry van - after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn't an accident at all? What if Barthes was murdered?
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Outstanding reader! Excellent choice of victim(s).
- By William on 11-01-17
By: Laurent Binet, and others
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Winter in Madrid
- By: C. J. Sansom
- Narrated by: Gordon Gordon
- Length: 21 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Winter in Madrid is set just after the bloody Spanish Civil War, with World War II looming over Europe. Reluctantly, Harry Brett looks for an old schoolmate who's become a person of interest for British intelligence.
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realistic characters in historical context
- By Annie on 10-04-09
By: C. J. Sansom
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Goodnight from London
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Robson
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1940, ambitious young American journalist Ruby Sutton gets her big break: the chance to report on the European war as a staff writer for Picture Weekly newsmagazine in London. She jumps at the chance, for it's an opportunity not only to prove herself, but also to start fresh in a city and country that know nothing of her humble origins. But life in besieged Britain tests Ruby in ways she never imagined.
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Light story
- By Bev Holdgate on 08-10-17
By: Jennifer Robson
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Hornet Flight
- By: Ken Follett
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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It's June 1941, and the low point of the war. England throws wave after wave of RAF bombers across the Channel, but somehow the Luftwaffe is able to shoot them down at will. The skies, indeed, the war itself seem to belong to Hitler.
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An Outstanding Spy Novel
- By C. McCoy on 03-13-05
By: Ken Follett
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A Spy by Nature
- A Novel
- By: Charles Cumming
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec Milius is young, smart, and ambitious. He also has a talent for deception. He is working in a dead-end job when a chance encounter leads him to MI6, the elite British Secret Intelligence Service, handing him an opportunity to play center stage in a dangerous game of espionage.
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I highly recommend this little gem
- By Chou Young on 02-14-08
By: Charles Cumming
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
What listeners say about Prague Spring
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- ProfLSW
- 03-01-20
Pure Mawer
The banal and extraordinary told in seductive, sensual, pictorial prose. As always Mawer retells historical events through the eyes and psyches of ordinary people whose lives take ironic, unpredictable turns because of the histories they live through. Excellent narration by Lister.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Susan
- 01-26-19
Brought up memories of my misspent youth!
Set in the tumultuous year of 1968 when everything seemed to be changing, from the hippies in San Francisco to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Simon Mawer is very good at this kind of historical fiction. Unfortunately, his book was ill served by the narrator who made the fake accents of non-English speakers sound very strange indeed.
It captures the era perfectly. Particularly the language of the young people. I have to say it may me wince to remember how quick we were to use the label “bourgeois” for anything we disapproved of. His description of their experiences hitchhiking across Europe felt very authentic, as well as the way in which they ended up in Czechoslovakia. It sounds absurd to me now, but flipping a coin to decide which direction you go in was the kind of thing that made a lot of sense at that time.
I managed to get past the difficulties with the narrator, but, in retrospect, I wish I had read it in paper, because I had to keep suppressing my annoyance at his rendition of the German and check accents.
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3 people found this helpful
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- YodaMaster
- 08-31-21
A 5 star story but poorly narrated
This is my third Simon Mawer novel. Enjoyed Trapeze, couldn’t finish Tightrope, and enjoyed this one. It would not qualify as a thriller, but was engrossing. A pair of Oxford college students, a young British diplomat, a Czech student, and supporting cast are drawn together in Prague just before Soviet troops invade. Although the characters are not deep, they are diverse and realistic. This Audible presentation is greatly weakened by the narrator, whose interpretations of what each character sounds like is jarring and improbable. I recommend Prague Spring enthusiastically as a novel, but strongly encourage bypassing the audio version.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Steve Estabrook
- 12-05-18
I dug it!
Terrific historical novel. If you’re interested in the Cold War era it will have special appeal to you as it did me. Highly recommended.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Mr. Eyuz
- 07-06-22
Novel Without a Cause
For much of its length, I was willing to allow this book to take its plodding course. The writing was the very essence of prosaic, but I figured we would eventually arrive at some point or revelation. Having finished the book, I am now just angry. Simon Mawer chooses a dramatic backdrop of historic events for his novel, only to drain his narrative assiduously of every bit of life. In the process, he manages an unenviable trick: marrying the sort of anti-narrative impulses of modernist fiction with a fundamentally jaded and conservative voice and vision. His sympathies seem to lie with the two unimaginative British men who are our surrogates for much of the novel’s journey, characters utterly devoid of charisma. Perhaps this is a new genre: bureaucratic literature?
The only points of interest in this tedious work are the occasional asides about modern Czechoslovak history. The book contains perhaps half a dozen apostrophes where the author pauses the story (a process that requires only the lightest application of brake pressure) to provide a little insight into some historic event or figure. If only I could have pulled those six pages from the text and discarded the rest.
Finally, a word about sex. I actually admire writing that captures sensuality convincingly, and if Mawer fails on this front, it’s not for want of trying. There isn’t much outright sex in Prague Spring, but there is a great deal of ogling and leering, all from the male perspective. To be fair, not all writers can transcend the bonds—real or imagined—of their gender, and I am not necessarily opposed to an author frankly embracing a “gaze” that is adamantly male or female. The problem here is that the point of view is so stunted and adolescent. Even this might be forgiven were this a work of forthright wish fulfillment in the manner of Ian Fleming. Couched in a novel that purports to be serious fiction—written in 2018 no less!—this sort of skulking and gawking is just vaguely embarrassing.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Brian Angevine
- 08-10-22
Pretentious
Made it through three chapters. Very boring and ridiculous. Hated it. What a waste of a selection.
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