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The Heat of the Day

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air.

Stella discovers that her lover, Robert, is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself.

Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.

©1948 Elizabeth Bowen (P)2021 Penguin Audio Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction War & Military Military
All stars
Most relevant
I found the interaction between the characters completely implausible and simply didn’t have the patience to listen beyond chapter 2. I know that Elizabeth Bowen is an acclaimed writer - and there are undoubtedly flashes of brilliance in the writing - but that cannot persuade me to finish a book in which the characters and their relationships, as well as the dialogue, are completely implausible

Dialogue Unrealistic-couldn’t get past chapter 2

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With strange pauses and random emphases it was at times like listening to a satnav voice, pronouncing words without understanding.

Great novel, badly read

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There are the makings of an interesting plot in this book, but it is broken up by huge sections of incomprehensible language, with endless sentences going nowhere. Many of these just don't make sense even after repeated listens and often seem to be a series of words randomly put together to give the novel some kind of philosophical gravity. The main story of Stella, Robert and Harrison is presumably supposed to be a spy novel, but there are also a number of other sub-plots containing related, but uninteresting characters and with no real significance to the main story. Worst of all is the narrator, who despite a pleasant voice appears to have never looked at the text and to have no idea of where the sentences are going. As a result, words are given the wrong emphasis, are spaced too far apart and the confused language becomes even more difficult to follow. I cannot recommend this book.

Dull book and terrible narrator

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Congratulations to those who managed to finish this book - I couldn’t. It sounded like such a good story but I found it very tedious and verbose, not helped by the narrator’s flat monotonous delivery.

Disappointing

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The narrator brilliantly brings Bowen to life, such a natural, lovely voice. Bowen's novel is wordy, cryptic, fantastic.

Fantastic narration

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