From Shadows on the Nile to Pride and Prejudice – Audiobook give away!

Occasionally I’m given an audiobook book to narrate that causes me to fall ever so slightly in love. I can’t stop thinking about one or more of the characters or the book. There’s something about the author’s spirit that feels familiar. I’m restless and distracted until I can be back in the studio, inhabiting the characters and world that I feel connected to and that I’ve been given the task of bringing to audio life.

This happened to me with bestselling author Kate Furnivall’s new novel, Shadows on the Nile just released in the US by Tantor audio. (To purchase and listen to a sample click Shadows on the Nile)

When we think of Egypt these days we usually think of war, kidnappings, violence and death. It’s been awhile since the great civilization that preceded Rome made it into the news.

Remember Tutenkhamen? The Valley of the Kings? You will when you listen to this one.

Oh, right! Egypt! That Egypt.

Shadows on the Nile starts in 1912. Jessie hears a scream in the night coming from her young brother, Georgie, who has autism – and she wakes to find him gone. Haunted by the same nightmare, twenty years later Jessie’s other brother disappears. Desperate to find him, Jessie is led into a world of seances, mystics and Egyptian artifacts.

We get to visit the Valley of the Dead and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which started at around that time. We’re in the hands of a master storyteller, so while being hugely entertained we also get a sense of how modern day Egypt came to be.

It’s a rollicking adventure full of excitement with an unlikely hero – Georgie – who is so beautifully portrayed we get an authentic sense of what it might be like to be autistic ourselves.

There’s a love story too – between two people who dislike each other at first – and the narrative drive is unrelenting. You just have to know what happens next.

Sometimes it can be a jolt moving from one audiobook narration to another. But this time the transition was a smooth one.

The day after I finished Shadows on the Nile, I took a brief turn in the garden to start thinking about my next audiobook, The 200th Anniversary audio edition of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

As I re-acquainted myself with Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, I thought about all the people who have read Jane Austen’s most famous novel since it first came out two hundred years ago. It was still as popular in the 1930’s as it is today.

As I walk in the garden, I imagine I’m a young woman escaping from the British Embassy party in Cairo in Kate Furnivall’s Egypt by pretending to have a headache. I don’t have a headache at all. I just want to get back to the book I’m reading – Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

With the distant sound of The Lonely Ash Grove coming from the party below, I get into bed and reach under the mosquito net for the leatherbound copy of Pride and Prejudice that my grandmother gave me for my birthday.

I want to find out if the hero and heroine, who dislike each other at first, will come to realize, by the end of the book, that they have already found true love.

And I read all night because, as is always the case with a marvelous book, I just have to know what happens next. . .

To listen to The Lonely Ash Grove and other English music that would have been familiar to the characters in both novels, click here.

To enter for a chance to win one of 5 copies of the MP3-CD, click here. Give away closes November 21 and is open to residents of the US only.  https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/71453-shadows-on-the-nile

Visit Kate Furnivall’s website at www.katefurnivall.com.

For more info about Alison Larkin, visit www.alisonlarkin.com .

 

This House Is Haunted by John Boyne. Audiobook giveaway today. Happy Halloween!

I don’t usually read ghost stories because – well,  I’m a wimp.  But when Hilary Rose at Tantor Audio asks me if I’m available to narrate a book for them, I clear my schedule and say ‘yes!’  Because the quality of the books she has been choosing for me recently is outstanding.

This House is Haunted by NY Times bestselling author John Boyne, set in England during the time of Charles Dickens may be the best yet.

I was fine – at first. The horror builds slowly, quietly with an underlying humor so you don’t realize what’s happening at first.  I got to read a wonderful scene when Charles Dickens – by all reports as marvelous an actor as he was a writer – gives a “devilish” reading of “The Signal-Man.” I could do this. No problem.

Then the heroine, quiet, literary Eliza, arrives at Gaudlin Hall to look after two children. Who are alone.

There are no adults present. Terrifying things happen in the dark that may or may not be initiated by the living.

Boyne has a superb ear for dialogue and much of the power of this book is due to his understated, subtle writing style which I felt it was crucial to mirror in the narration. A case of less is more –  and his portrayal of the children is so powerful because of he doesn’t over write them.

At one particularly scary point, just as a dark force started blowing Eliza Cain across the room, a door banged downstairs in my kitchen – and I screamed.

You will too. Happy Halloween.

To celebrate the release of This House Is Haunted a Goodreads giveaway has been set up for a chance to win one of five MP3-CDs from Oct 31-Nov 7! Open to residents of the US only. Clck on link at bottom of this page to enter and WIN!

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/show/70517-this-house-is-haunted