The Wrong People
Valancourt 20th Century Classics
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Narrated by:
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Hannibal Hills
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By:
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Robin Maugham
About this listen
Set against the seedy backdrop of 1960s Tangier, The Wrong People (1967) is the story of Arnold Turner, a repressed English schoolmaster on holiday in Morocco, where he meets Ewing Baird, a wealthy American expat with a dark secret.
Ewing lavishly entertains him and even provides him with a young lover, but as Arnold becomes more and more involved with Ewing he realizes only too late that he has been lured into a dangerous trap - and his only chance of escape is by helping Ewing to carry out a sinister plan.
Drawing in part on the author’s real-life efforts to expose the African sex trafficking trade, Robin Maugham’s first explicitly gay-themed novel was both a critical and a commercial success, being reprinted several times - including in the important Gay Modern Classics series - and was optioned for a film version by Sal Mineo (Rebel Without a Cause).
"I can only think of a handful of novelists who can play the reader like a hooked fish with comparable ingenuity and suppleness." (Francis King, Sunday Telegraph)
"A very well-told story, every move nicely calculated and undeniably shuddery." (Daily Telegraph)
"A gripping thriller. Storytelling at its best." (Sunday Express)
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Jim Henderson is one of six guests summoned by the mysterious Edwin Carson, a collector of precious stones, to a weekend party at his country house, Thrackley. The house is gloomy and forbidding, but the party is warm and hospitable except for the presence of Jacobson, the sinister butler. The other guests are wealthy people draped in jewels; Jim cannot imagine why he belongs in such company. After a weekend of adventure with attempted robbery and a vanishing guest, secrets come to light, and Jim unravels a mystery from his past.
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Perfect for Your Next Weekend, Wherever You Are
- By John on 07-04-19
By: Alan Melville
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The Nanny
- A Novel
- By: Gilly Macmillan
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett, Patience Tomlinson, Ben Eliot
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In this compulsively listenable tale of secrets, lies, and deception, Gilly Macmillan explores the darkest impulses and desires of the human heart. Diabolically clever, The Nanny reminds us that sometimes the truth hurts so much you’d rather hear the lie.
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Great gripping story!
- By Jordan Zenzel on 10-01-19
By: Gilly Macmillan
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The Royal Correspondent
- A Novel
- By: Alexandra Joel
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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The author of The Paris Model captures the glamour, style, excitement, and romance of a bygone era in this sumptuous novel - set in the Sydney and London of the 1960s - about an up-and-coming young Australian reporter with a deadly secret.
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Story engaging. Narrator not so much.
- By Anne M. Kelley on 09-15-22
By: Alexandra Joel
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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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Brideshead Revisited
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Evelyn Waugh's most celebrated work is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the story mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh.
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Extraordinary
- By Vieux Carré Blonde on 12-12-12
By: Evelyn Waugh
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Queen of the Mersey
- By: Maureen Lee
- Narrated by: Maggie Ollerenshaw
- Length: 17 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Queenie is only 14 and has been deserted by her mother. Set in Liverpool and Wales at the outbreak of World War II, this story explores themes of female friendship and betrayal from the perspective of a group of women of widely different ages.
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Entertaining
- By W on 05-27-08
By: Maureen Lee
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Kiss
- By: Jill Mansell
- Narrated by: Gabrielle Baker
- Length: 16 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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When aspiring musician Izzy is knocked off her motorbike, she doesn't just lose her dignity - she loses both long-term boyfriends, her job, and her beautiful apartment. Gina, who caused the accident, has more important things to worry about: Her husband has just deserted her for his pregnant mistress. Why should she care about Izzy? Yet, somehow, Gina finds herself opening her home to Izzy and her spirited teenage daughter.
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The story went on and on and on…
- By Karen S on 07-30-23
By: Jill Mansell
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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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Overall
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Performance
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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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Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married
- By: Marian Keyes
- Narrated by: Amy McAllister
- Length: 17 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Lucy Sullivan is 26 and living it up (and occasionally down) in London. Hers is a life of quiet, undisciplined desperation. But when she and three friends visit a psychic for a bit of fun and the woman's predictions start coming true, Lucy is horrified. For the fortune-teller insisted she'd soon be married - within the year, in fact. Not only does Lucy not have a boyfriend, but the chances of getting one are looking slim. Between the bottles of wine, antidepressants and her addiction to self-help books, she's not quite ready to walk, or even stumble, down the aisle sober.
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Worst characters ever
- By Ada Harsema Engdahl on 01-30-20
By: Marian Keyes
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The Moon, the Stars, and Madame Burova
- A Novel
- By: Ruth Hogan
- Narrated by: Nina Wadia
- Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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After inheriting her mother’s fortune-telling business as a young woman, Imelda Burova has spent her life on the Brighton pier practicing her trade. She and her trusty pack of Tarot cards have seen the lovers and the liars, the angels and the devils, the dreamers and the fools. Now, after a lifetime of keeping other people’s secrets, Madam Burova is ready to have a little piece of life for herself. But she still has one last thing to do—to fulfill a promise made in the 1970s, when she and her girlfriends were carefree, with their whole lives still before them.
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Trigger warning
- By Kristyn Rose on 01-30-23
By: Ruth Hogan
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The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
What listeners say about The Wrong People
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Clau
- 02-27-20
A very engaging story
An atmospheric, very compelling novella, dealing with the queer ex-pat living in Tangier right after WWII, and the way one of them manipulate a UK school teacher into bringing him a very young English boy to grooming him to be his companion.
The thematic is harsh, but, even when sometimes it veers into purple prose, the writing is really good, and the story kept me captivated.
Hannibal Hills does an excellent job with the narration.
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- Bridget C.
- 05-13-20
A product of its time?
Maugham was a hell of a writer but this book creeped me out. I realize a lot of that has to do with the current mores of contemporary America but conflating homosexuality with pederasty should be jarring in any context because they are not the same thing. I think this book has a lot more to do with class and money and power but that gets glossed over in favor of detailed recountings of long conversations and casual racism.
I kept contrasting this story to A Little Life as I listened to it. They're not the same story in the slightest but almost like two sides of a terrible coin -- The Wrong People being men justifying their terrible actionsand A Little Life the actual impact of those actions on a young man.
While it's nice to have an introduction to work from Maugham's long term partner, I wish it was possible to have a 2nd introduction from a more neutral 3rd party. The novel that Lawrence describes in his forward doesn't much resemble what I listened to.
(Thank you Valancourt for the free audiobook code.)
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- John Edward
- 03-03-20
An important look into the human condition.
I've always wanted to read about these times in Tangier when people like Truman Capote, Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams were around and indulging in the dark side. I couldn't put this book down and I truly could not predict what would happen next. There are no explicit sex scenes but prostitution and human trafficking are issues.
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- Deedra
- 09-17-20
The wrong people
This was hard to keep up with.It was a twisted tale of debauchery.Hannibal Hills was a pleasure to listen to though!I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.'
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- Retired 39
- 04-01-20
The Seedy Side of Tangiers in the 1960s
Robin Maugham is best known as the nephew of W. Somerset Maugham. The Wrong People is one of Robin’s better known novels.
The Wrong People evokes the seedy backstreets and bars of Tangiers in the 1960s when Europeans, particularly men from the UK, vacationed to enjoy the pleasures of young men. While neither the novel nor this audiobook version ever graphically describes sexual acts, in many ways making them implicit seems to make them even more erotic. Like other works written at the time, there are shocking examples of racism.
Despite a less than satisfying conclusion to this improbably story, Hannibal Hills does a credible job in bringing Maugham’s characters to life through his narration.
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