The Return
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Narrated by:
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Stefan Rudnicki
About this listen
“What a haunting inescapable riddle life was.”
A classic ghost story, Walter de la Mare’s The Return follows the exceedingly ordinary Arthur Lawford and his possession by none other than an eighteenth-century pirate!
While wandering the local graveyard on behalf of his wife, whom he can sense wishes him out of the house for a bit, Lawford comes across the grave of Nicholas Sabathier and experiences a nasty shock that feels something like a heart attack. But when he wakes back up in the graveyard the next morning, he returns home, goes to his bedroom, and turns to the mirror only to see that a dead Frenchman is staring back at him from the looking glass. And that dead Frenchman is exactly who Sheila Lawford sees when she looks at her husband. Lawford must convince his wife, the vicar, the doctor, and anyone else he comes across that he is in fact ordinary Arthur before they can even begin to work to rid him of this ghost.
The Return is a haunting portrayal of domestic drama, ghostly possession, and unrequited love that fits firmly among de la Mare’s finest Gothic tales.
Originally published in 1910.
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A very mixed review
- By Michael Mayer on 08-05-15
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Dracula
- By: Bram Stoker
- Narrated by: Nick Sandys
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Now, Bram Stoker's Dracula - the pinnacle of Gothic horror for generations - rises again. When young English lawyer Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania on the eve of Saint George's Day, he cannot shake a strange feeling of uneasiness. The air grows colder as he arrives at his destination: the castle of Count Dracula. Jonathan has been summoned by the count for business, and while he finds his new host obliging and polite, he can't help but notice the man's pallid skin, odd lack of appetite, and long daytime absences.
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Bram Stoker + Nick Sandys = Pure Satisfaction
- By Jared on 01-09-19
By: Bram Stoker
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The Scarlet Pimpernel
- By: Baroness Orczy
- Narrated by: David Thorn
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the French Revolution, where a dashing English aristocrat risks his life to enter France and save innocents from the guillotine.
The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a secret society of English aristocrats who are determined to rescue their French counterparts from execution. Their leader is the mysterious Scarlet Pimpernel, whose name comes from the drawing of a red flower he uses to sign his messages.
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Great Performance, Awful Production
- By John on 02-24-14
By: Baroness Orczy
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Shirley
- By: Charlotte Brontë
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 25 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the industrialising England of the Napoleonic wars, a period of bad harvests, Luddite riots, and economic unrest, Shirley is the story of two contrasting heroines and the men they love. One is the shy Caroline Helstone, trapped in the oppressive atmosphere of a Yorkshire rectory, whose life represents the plight of single women in the 19th century. The other is the vivacious Shirley Keeldar, who inherits a local estate and whose wealth liberates her from convention.
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"As Romantic As Monday Morning"
- By Joseph R on 09-15-09
By: Charlotte Brontë
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The Most Dangerous Game
- By: Richard Connell
- Narrated by: B.J. Harrison
- Length: 58 mins
- Unabridged
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A mysterious island, shrouded in fear, evil, and darkness. Here the amoral General Zaroff hunts. And what, you ask, is the most dangerous game? It is the manner and substance of his nightly killings.
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A TRUE COSMOPOLITE
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 08-02-16
By: Richard Connell
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Lady Audley's Secret
- By: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- Narrated by: Olivia Poulet
- Length: 13 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of The Christmas Hirelings comes this Audible Exclusive production of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s classic sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. English actress Olivia Poulet gives an assured and captivating narration; a cornerstone of the genre and a scandal at the time of its publication, Lady Audley’s Secret is an entertaining and shocking tale of high drama and shifting perceptions.
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Classic 19th Century “sensation novel”
- By Susan on 08-20-19
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Night and Day
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 18 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Written before she began her experiments in the writing of fiction, Virginia Woolf's second novel, Night and Day, is a story about a group of young people trying to discover what it means to fall in love. It asks all the big questions: What does it mean to fall in love? Does marriage grant happiness? What is happiness? Night and Day is a conventional novel; however, it maps out for us the world of Virginia Woolf in its wondrous prose: For her it was the beginning, leading on to a prolonged engagement with her search for the means to express the "inner life".
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"After all, what is love?"
- By Eman Abd Allah on 12-13-16
By: Virginia Woolf
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Father
- By: Elizabeth Von Arnim
- Narrated by: Penelope Freeman
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Since her mother's death, Jennifer has devoted years of her life to her father, managing the family home. After the sudden announcement that he has taken a new wife, Jennifer, at 33, seizes the opportunity to lead an independent life. Quickly she secures the lease of Rose Cottage and turns her attention to her own interests. While Jennifer is desperate to experience life on her own terms within her reduced financial means, her neighbour, Alice, is pre-occupied with ensuring her position as head of her brother's household is never challenged.
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Worse Audio Book I Have Ever Heard
- By Phyllis Woodford on 11-05-21
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Desperate Remedies
- By: Thomas Hardy
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston. Desperate Remedies contains sensational ingredients of blackmail, murder and romance, but with its insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy’s future genius.
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Real Hardy, not his best but very good.
- By F Shaw on 03-21-23
By: Thomas Hardy
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Emily of New Moon
- The Emily Trilogy, Book 1
- By: L. M. Montgomery
- Narrated by: Megan Follows
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Abridged
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Like Anne, Emily Starr is a quick-witted and imaginative orphan who is sent to live with her two maiden aunts at New Moon Farm after her father dies. Though initially disheartened by her strict and conventional Aunt Elizabeth, Emily slowly grows to love her new family and New Moon Farm. There she makes friends with Ilse Burnley, a tomboy with a blazing temper; quiet, artistic Teddy Kent; and Perry Miller, the hired boy, who Aunt Elizabeth looks down upon because he was born in the impoverished “Stovepipe Town”.
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Beautiful!!
- By giniareads on 07-01-21
By: L. M. Montgomery
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White Nights
- By: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Narrated by: Simon Hester
- Length: 2 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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"White Nights" is one of Dostoyevsky's shorter works told from the standpoint of an ultimate introvert, brought briefly out of his shell by love. It might have been written 170 years ago, but certain aspects of it are very relatable to the modern listener, especially to those of us who gravitate toward solitude and introversion.
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Incredible Romance Novel
- By Matthew Marks on 10-13-24
What listeners say about The Return
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jefferson
- 02-22-24
“Standing face to face with the unknown”
What a weird story is Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910)!
Stolid English gentleman Arthur Lawford is convalescing from a recent illness when, full of melancholy and ennui he wanders into small, old Witherstone churchyard to read the gravestones there. One stone set apart from the others in the unmarked grave area grabs his attention because it's from the 18th century and belongs to a Huguenot “stranger” called Nicholas Sabathier who took his own life. When he bends down to examine the gravestone and tries to put his fingers into the large crack running down the middle, he's filled with dismay and weariness, feels “the target of cold and hostile scrutiny,” and perhaps loses consciousness. But then he finds himself elatedly trotting home feeling quite healthy after having been so sick. Back in his bedroom, he feels alert like a night creature fearing danger and then looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face looking back at him!
The novel then minutely details Arthur’s desperate attempts to find out what’s happened to him and to come to terms with it and to convince his wife that he’s himself while trying to avoid being seen by their maid or friends, who, of course, would believe he’s a stranger, etc. Or is he simply suffering from illness and nerves and imagining the change in his face? What should he do? Reading through a big medical book sure doesn’t solve his dilemma. He contemplates suicide.
Luckily, he has allies in his horrible predicament, like the family friend old vicar Bethany, who takes it on faith (with the support of some answers to questions that only he and Arthur would know) that it’s Arthur behind the stranger’s mask, and an odd brother and sister who live away from society next to the churchyard and some constantly flowing water and suggest supernatural explanations (after all, as the brother tells Arthur, “It's only the impossible that's credible whatever credible means”). What resonates with Arthur is being told that he’s suffering from a complete transmogrification due to some intrusion or enchantment, that anything outlandish and bizarre is a godsend in this rather stodgy life, and that after all the “ghost” who tried to possess him mostly failed and could only replace his face.
In the usual ghost story of possession, a spirit inhabits a victim’s body, but de la Mare imagines the body of a spirit inhabiting a victim’s soul, so to speak. That is, Arthur, despite some possible assaults on his personality and insertions of foreign memories, remains essentially himself, though indeed given his traumatic experience, he does not remain his pre-possession boring, conventional, unimaginative self, who led a “meaningless,” half-dead life. His love for his trusty and trusting fifteen-year-old daughter Alice deepens, but his view of his practical wife Sheila, too concerned with what their community will think and half believing that some sin of Arthur has called this calamity down on him, does not improve.
Although it gets a little talky now and then, the novel has lots of great writing—
*numinous descriptions, like
“…out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of some other world.”
*vivid similes, like
“His companion’s face was still smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone.”
*neat lines on human nature and life, like
“Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust?”
But what will practical people like Sheila’s cynical, practical, toadlike friend Danton (who says things like, “Servants must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children”) do? Will he really try to have Arthur committed to an asylum so he can’t do any mischief to anyone? Or if he’s looking back more like his original self, will they let the matter drop? Will Sheila and Arthur salvage their relationship? Will he visit the unconventional, cool brother and sister team again? Has he really ejected Sabathier in spirit AND body or only in spirit? Was he ever really possessed by the Frenchman’s face? What DOES it all mean?
The novel strongly conveys how contingent are our relationships with other people and our own identities, how deeply based they are upon our faces as people (including ourselves) get used to them over time, and how the scientific/realistic view is unable to deal with certain experiences in life, and how convention and protocol and face etc. are stodgy and stultifying, and how common kindness and love and care and concern may ground us. And how mysterious life is and how magical the world:
“It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.”
American audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki is his usual professional, deep and rich voiced self here, though he kind of assumes a slight British accent for this British novel about a British gentleman.
My favorite book by de la Mare is his sublime (and superficially very different) children’s book The Three Mulla Mulgars (1919), but The Return is strange and absorbing. Readers who like Henry James and Algernon Blackwood should read it.
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