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The Birthday Present
- Narrated by: Ruth Sillers, Paul Blake
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
Ivor Tesham is a handsome, single, young Member of Parliament whose political star is on the rise. When he meets a woman in a chance encounter–a beautiful, married woman named Hebe–the two become lovers, obsessed with their illicit and adventurous trysts. But when Ivor plans for a surprise daring sexual adventure as a birthday present for Hebe, things take a disastrous turn it's late spring of 1990 and a love affair is flourishing: between Ivor, a rising star of the Conservative government, and Hebe, a stunning North London housewife stuck in a dull marriage. On the eve of her birthday, Ivor gives Hebe a present to remember: a mock-kidnapping in which she is to be snatched from the street, bound and gagged, and then delivered to him. It’s all intended as mock-dangerous foreplay, but then things take a disastrous turn. After an accidental death, Ivor begins to receive anonymous letters that reveal shockingly specific details about the affair and its aftermath. Somehow he must keep his role from being uncovered–and his political future from being destroyed by scandal.
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For the past 33 years, Angela Gillespie has sent to friends and family around the world an end-of-the-year letter titled ‘Hello from the Gillespies’. It’s always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises herself - she tells the truth....
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Engaging
- By mgn on 08-18-15
By: Monica McInerney
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The Body on the Beach
- A Fethering Mystery
- By: Simon Brett
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Recently retired, Carole Seddon is residing in Fethering in the cottage she purchased with her ex-husband. There she maintains a quiet and sensible life with the companionship of Gulliver, her Labrador retriever. But everything changes when she and Gulliver, while taking their daily constitutional, find a corpse on the beach. What's more, there are two wounds on its neck. The body mysteriously disappears and the police dismiss Carole as a befuddled middle-aged woman.
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Reminds me of "Rosemary & Thyme" TV series
- By Crochetaway on 11-17-14
By: Simon Brett
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Watermelon
- By: Marian Keyes
- Narrated by: Gerri Halligan
- Length: 13 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At 29, Claire is full of the joys of life - that is, until her husband leaves her on the day she gives birth to her baby. With a broken heart, a beautiful newly born and an expanding mirror image, she decides to visit her eccentric family in Dublin. There she starts to feel better. So much better, in fact, that James is in for a surprise when he decides to slither back into her life....
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A fun read, every time
- By Audrey Smith on 01-06-23
By: Marian Keyes
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Shadow of a Century
- By: Jean Grainger
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.
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Loved this book!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-20
By: Jean Grainger
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Talking It Over
- By: Julian Barnes
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey, Alex Jennings, Clare Higgins
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Introducing Stuart, Gillian and Oliver. One by one they take their turn to speak straight out to the camera - and give their side of a contemporary love triangle. What begins as a comedy of misunderstanding slowly darkens and deepens into a compelling exploration of the quagmires of the heart.
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The Narrative Gimmick Works
- By Alan on 11-22-11
By: Julian Barnes
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How It All Began
- By: Penelope Lively
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Charlotte Rainsford, a retired schoolteacher, is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of acquaintances and strangers alike. A marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; a posh yet financially strapped interior designer meets a business partner who might prove too good to be true.
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Wonderful and beautifully written
- By Molly-o on 02-15-12
By: Penelope Lively
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The Good Friday Murder
- A Christine Bennett Mystery, Book 1
- By: Lee Harris
- Narrated by: Dee Macaluso
- Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Christine Bennett has left the cloistered world of nuns for the profane world of New York State, where murder and madness are often linked. At a town meeting, Christine volunteers to investigate a 40-year-old murder case long since closed. Now she'll move heaven and earth to exonerate a pair of retarded savant twins, now senior citizens, of their mother's murder on Good Friday in 1950.
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Polite procedural cozy
- By connie on 12-29-12
By: Lee Harris
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Mrs Queen Takes the Train
- By: William Kuhn
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An absolute delight of a debut novel by William Kuhn - author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books - Mrs Queen Takes the Train wittily imagines the kerfuffle that transpires when a bored Queen Elizabeth strolls out of the palace in search of a little fun, leaving behind a desperate team of courtiers who must find the missing Windsor before a national scandal erupts.
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Can't believe how much I loved this story
- By analyzethis on 03-10-13
By: William Kuhn
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Past Imperfect
- By: Julian Fellowes
- Narrated by: Richard Morant
- Length: 16 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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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Even better in audio form
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Top notch Barbara Vine
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Well done
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The First Lord Nanther, expert in blood diseases, particularly the royal disease of Heamophilia, and favoured physician to Queen Victoria, clearly hoped to be the subject of an admiring posthumous biography. But when his great-grandson, Martin Nanther begins to research his life for a biography, the Martin comes to suspect that his great-grandfather’s old records conceal more than they reveal.
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clever, excellent storytelling
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Asta's Book
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It is 1905. Asta and her husband, Rasmus, have come to East London from Denmark with their two little boys. With Rasmus constantly away on business, Asta keeps loneliness and isolation at bay by writing a diary. These diaries, published over 70 years later, reveal themselves to be more than a mere journal. For they seem to hold the key to an unsolved murder and to the mystery of a missing child. It falls to Asta's granddaughter, Ann, to unearth the buried secrets of nearly a century before.
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Confusing, by it could just have been me
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Oh my!
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Even better in audio form
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Well done
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clever, excellent storytelling
- By connie on 07-09-11
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Confusing, by it could just have been me
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Amazing reader elevates book to a higher level
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Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
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Mystery with humor and insight
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The first girl had a bite mark on her neck, but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. But the tabloids got hold of the story and called the killer 'The Rottweiler' and the name stuck. The latest murder takes place very near Inez Ferry's antique shop in Marylebone. When the Rottweiler’s trinkets start showing up in the shop, suddenly, everyone Inez knows is a suspect, and the killer feels all too close.
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Lots of atmosphere, and a Freudian mystery.
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The Bridesmaid
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Senta Pelham is a mirror image of Flora, the lovely marble bust Philip fanaticized about for so long. But life, like art, is not always what its mere surface suggests. And Senta’s strange world of make-believe, where truth and falsehood are eerily interchangeable, soon draws Philip into a shadowy cloister of vague and uncertain terror.
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Well-written and creepy tale
- By Kitty Kat on 11-13-20
By: Ruth Rendell
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King Solomon's Carpet
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Eccentric Jarvis lives in a crumbling schoolhouse overlooking the tube line, compiling his obsessive history of the Underground. A group of misfits are also drawn towards his strange house: Alice, who has run away from her husband and baby; Tom, the busker who rescues her; truant Jasper who finds his terrifying thrills on the tube; and enigmatic Axel, whose deadly secret casts a shadow over all their lives.
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Fascinating
- By Pat on 04-04-11
By: Barbara Vine
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Gallowglass
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sandor is a wonderful storyteller and little Joe is ready to listen. The power of the educated over the simple is horribly clear in this disturbing and unusual relationship. As Sandor’s motivation both for rescuing little Joe and then for weaving his spell of words becomes clear, the darkness surrounding him is too much for them both, and for the beautiful ex-model sequestered in her Suffolk mansion by an obsessive husband.
By: Barbara Vine
What listeners say about The Birthday Present
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Yennta
- 08-04-09
Love This Writer Always, But...
This was so terrific, so far above most other thriller/novel writers, and in fact this is a novel rather than a thriller. You can tell because Ruth Rendell is being Barbara Vine here, in one of her -- what my cousin calls -- sociopath novels. BUT I just reread (re-listened to) The Minotaur also by B.Vine. I was blown away by how absolutely riveting it was the second time around. It may be her best. READ THE MINOTAUR. It's such a stunner.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lesley
- 05-02-09
Social Crime
A very British theme ... a gentleman must do what a gentleman must do. A landed gentry politician with 'out of the norm' sexual preferences is plagued throughout his career by an 'accident' which would expose him if it were ever examined closely. We follow his anxiety through the eyes of his brother-in-law and through the eyes of his dead lover's bridesmaid. The brother-in-law is super conservative and unexceptional. The bridesmaid is ... unstable. Crime plays a very small part in the whole story. Insinuation and assumption play very large parts. Different, but absorbing and told by a master story teller. The narrators are to be applauded.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Quahog
- 03-13-10
Atypical Vine
I have always read or listened to any new book by Barbara Vine that appears. Her best books can make me shiver in recollection even years later. This is the first that I've found boring. There are two narrators, neither of them likable, and I found it hard to suspend my disbelief in the plot, which seemed to drag on. Nor could I care about the off-putting central character. A disappointment.
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4 people found this helpful