The Willows
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Narrated by:
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Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot
About this listen
FNH Audio presents a full reading of The Willows by Algernon Blackwood. This story written in 1907 has stood the test of time. It is today, just as creepy and unnerving as it was in its own time. Algernon Blackwood is probably best known for this story and another classic "The Wendigo". Although his writings do not focus on horror, he has in this case created an outstanding work in that genre. It's not blood and gore based horror, but rather a story that works on the mind.
The story follows two friends who are on a simple, relaxing canoe trip down the Danube. Stopping in towns they pass to pick up and food, and pitching a tent wherever they choose to stop for the night. It's supposed to be a relaxing holiday.
Alas for them it does not remain that way. After the river floods, the pair find themselves riding along on a raging torrent and have to draw up the canoe on an island in mid-stream. It's at this point that the author brings his real talents to bear. Through the first person narrative we are not only told the story but unease sets in. You'll question if the narrator is reliable or perhaps under some other world influence. It's this clever technique that hooks the audience and makes this a story just as good today, as the day it was written.
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The Voyage Out is Virginia Woolf's haunting tale about a naïve young woman's sea voyage from London to a small resort on the South American coast. In symbolic, lyrical, and intoxicating prose, her outward journey begins to mirror her internal voyage into adulthood as she searches for her personal identity, grapples with love, and learns how to face life intellectually and emotionally. Its wit and exquisiteness, and its profound depth and insight into humanity, will capture the imagination of the listener.
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Lovely
- By Edith on 05-24-19
By: Virginia Woolf
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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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Mrs. Dalloway
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.
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One Tough Read Perfectly Delivered
- By Chris on 06-11-12
By: Virginia Woolf
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Villette
- By: Charlotte Brontë
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 22 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Hailed as Charlotte Brontë’s “finest novel” by Virginia Woolf, Villette is the timeless semi-autobiographical tale of Lucy Snowe. Left with no family and no money, Lucy goes against her own timid nature and travels to the small city of Villette, France, where she becomes a school teacher in Madame Beck’s school for girls. During her stay, she falls in love—twice—and discovers an independent, inner strength rarely seen in women of her time.
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The Divine Ms. Porter delivers as always
- By peachnmario on 03-17-15
By: Charlotte Brontë
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Death in Venice
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: Peter Batchelor
- Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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A stunningly beautiful youth and the city of Venice set the stage for Thomas Mann’s introspective examination of erotic love and philosophical wisdom.
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A problem with the narration
- By Erez on 03-19-12
By: Thomas Mann
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An Old-Fashioned Girl
- By: Louisa May Alcott
- Narrated by: Anne Hancock
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Immediately following the success of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott sat down to write An-Old Fashioned Girl, expanding on the subject of rich versus poor that she explored in her first novel. It’s a story of a country mouse and a city mouse: 14-year-old Polly Milton travels to Boston for a stay with her friend Fanny Shaw. The wealthy Shaws’ way of life is foreign to Polly who tries to adapt but is quickly labeled “old-fashioned”. Fanny and her friends dress and behave as their elders do, flirting with boys and gossiping.
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Okay
- By selene on 07-15-18
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The Dead Travel Fast
- By: Deanna Raybourn
- Narrated by: Charlotte Parry
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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With a modest inheritance and the three gowns that comprise her entire wardrobe, Theodora leaves Edinburgh—and a disappointed suitor—far behind. She is bound for Romania, where tales of vampires are still whispered, to visit an old friend and write the book that will bring her true independence. She arrives at a magnificent, decaying castle in the Carpathians, replete with eccentric inhabitants, including the castle’s master, Count Andrei Dragulescu.
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Process vs getting their
- By Aryn on 04-29-11
By: Deanna Raybourn
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Emily of New Moon
- By: L. M. Montgomery
- Narrated by: Andrea Emmes
- Length: 12 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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From the beloved author of Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery - Emily of New Moon (published in 1923) takes us on a journey of loss, friendship, bullying, family dynamics, acceptance, and self-discovery with Emily Byrd Starr, an orphan who must move in with her reluctant Aunt Elizabeth, her loving Aunt Laura, and her jovial and friendly Cousin Jimmy at New Moon on Prince Edward Island.
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Too stressful
- By Aaron and Greta Pankratz on 02-06-24
By: L. M. Montgomery
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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
What listeners say about The Willows
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kathy
- 11-21-11
Leaves you thinking
Do you ever go camping? Have you seen the leaves turning over in the wind at the edge of a campfire? Then you can really relate to "The Willows". Don't miss this seemingly normal little trip down a flooded river - not sure if I'll ever camp where there are willows again - enjoy!
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Overall
- Diane
- 06-24-11
can't decide still?
Well, I bought it based on good reviews and a liking for this sort of story. On the positive, it is supremely well written and read. Almost poetry in the way things are described. On the negative, not enough happens to explain and yes, I know, it's a subtle story but I mean, really, it's never explained and then it just ends. I still feel worth listening to though for the writing and reading and the story idea.
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- Jefferson
- 04-25-12
H. P. Lovecraft's Favorite Horror Story
In Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" (1907) the first person narrator and his friend are canoeing down the Danube through Eastern Europe when they camp on a sandy island in a vast marshy region populated by innumerable willows. Although the narrator has been charmed by earlier friendly willows, "showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty," on the island they oppress him with what seems to be malevolent sentience. He and his companion watch a human corpse rolling by the island in the flooding river. Or was it only an otter?
The island turns out to be a kind of junction between our world and another. The beings of the other world are powerful and inimical, and the longer the narrator and his friend stay on the island, the more the aliens become attuned to their thoughts and emotions and become able to influence them. It is not, perhaps, that the alien beings are willows, so much as that they are able to act in our world through them. The tension in the story increases until the terrified friends are trying to stay sane and safe by confining their thoughts to mundane things. More than death, they dread being changed in some unknown way by the alien beings.
"The Willows" is not an easy listen, because Felbrigg Napoleon Herriot reads it rapidly, while Blackwood's rich prose should be slowly savored and pondered, so that I frequently found myself rewinding to re-listen to certain parts. But Herriot's voice and manner and British accent are otherwise just right for the sensitive narrator and intellectual horror story.
And I can see why H. P. Lovecraft loved "The Willows," because it is vivid and poetic and evokes the sublimity of the natural world so as to tear open the veil between reality and the gulf of everything we can never understand about it. The narrator telling the story of his encounter with vast, malevolent, and incomprehensible alien forces feels like a prototype of Lovecraft's narrators and their experiences, though Blackwood's alien beings remain more anonymous and enigmatic than Lovecraft's.
Finally, I prefer Blackwood's more moving and strange "The Man Whom the Trees Loved" (available for free on LibriVox), but "The Willows" is an interesting listen.
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