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Waiting for Sunrise

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Waiting for Sunrise

By: William Boyd
Narrated by: Jack Rowan
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the enigmatic, intensely beautiful Hettie Bull walks in, Lysander is immediately drawn to her, unaware of how destructive the consequences of their subsequent affair will be. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous web of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life...

© William Boyd 2012 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 20th Century Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World War I Fiction England
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I'm very much enjoying william Boyd's books at the moment and this one did not disappoint. It has his signature blend of recreating an image of a particular place and time in your in your memory (here Vienna, London and Geneva 1913-15) whilst filling it with interesting characters and language that is a pleasure to read/listen to.

Jack Rowan does a good job overall and he has a nice voice. His English accents are great, but foreign pronunciations need some work. Quite refreshing to have a novel like Boyd's narrated in a cockney twang.

Very enjoyable.

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It is a pity that the narration is so poor. It is monotonous without any feel, inflection or variance of tone. Nevertheless I stuck with it and eventually I became unaware of this problem. The story was quite interesting and had enough pace. Not the best work of fiction but I enjoyed it enough.

Poor Narration

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This has to be the worst read book on Audible. I am surprised that Penguin (and William Boyd?) chose this actor to read it. Huge number of mispronunciations and a very irritating Cockney accent for virtually all the characters. All they did was jar and get in the way of the story.

William Boyd’s ‘Any Human Heart’ and ‘Restless’ are superb novels. I thought this was a much weaker effort with poor pacing and too much descriptive flannel which added little to the narrative drive of the story.

Final verdict- disappointing.

Appallingly read - disappointing story

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I love William Boyd’s work and yet again this is a beautifully researched yarn that twists and turns and takes the reader on a thrilling journey. However, they chose the wrong narrator and it’s gratingly distracting. Put simply, he has the wrong accent for an upper middle class protagonist so any dialogue voiced as the main character is utterly unconvincing. The narrator consistently mispronounces any word over 2 syllables, putting stresses on the wrong syllables and generally butchering the text.
He also, clearly, has never studied French which is a problem because there are a lot of French place names in the book. As a result I had to keep stopping and rewinding to try to decipher the narration. As I’m Welsh I found his mispronunciation of ‘Llanelli’ particularly awful. It’s not difficult to fix any of this, just check pronunciation with a native speaker.

Another Boyd tour de force but let down by narrator

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I’m confident that a 1910s West End actor would not have lost his ‘t’s in the middle of quite so many words. And I'm sure he'd know how to pronounce Folkestone. Perfect for a Nick Hornby but very, very distracting here. Ultimately made it almost impossible to suspend disbelief.

Spoiled by t glottalisation and mispronunciation

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