Like a delicious hot bath

Why are people knocking this book? Kate Atkinson is an admirable novelist. Long live Kate!

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2 people found this helpful

Good cliffhangers!

This was the book for a club book night I couldn’t attend but listened to anyway. A good ‘page turner’ that skips around time periods with unexplained cliffhanger moments which keeps you listening so you can find out what led to the various events. Really enjoyed the story while driving and made being stuck in traffic jams significantly more tolerable!

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1 person found this helpful

A perfect period piece for an Amazon Series.

A melting pot of detailed characters and events.
I found myself living the moments as they unfolded.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

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1 person found this helpful

The Best listening Experience in a Long Time

Do not miss listening to this exceptional audio-book. Both the novel and the performance of it by Jason Watkins will draw you in, engage and thoroughly involve you. I was surprised to the extent of this. The wide range of characters will see you quickly warming to some very strongly so that you become advocates and yearning for positive resolutions to their particular stories. Who can resist Miss Kelling and Freda? There will be other loyalties. Other characters will likely attract your invective; why not? I loved the evil transformation of Yvonne Stuart-Hargreaves from ‘Hi-di-Hi’ into Miss Ada Sherbourne of the Vanbrugh Academy of Dance. This particular world of 1920s London without real compass is well drawn. No matter that little is made of the General Strike. We are enmeshed in a world where Kate Atkinson’s use of coincidence as a device (never a convenience) gives you the certainty that quite anything can happen. (I did a personal double-take when a street in London was mentions only five minutes after reading about it for an entirely different purpose.) The Atkinson’s narrative is not sequential, but that does not make it hard to follow. The chapters of this novel are expertly managed and this helps the momentum of the book. My only real niggle about this really excellent book are what I would call the ‘what happened next’ sections. For me they broke the spell of the book, and so mentally I have ditched them. The performance of this audio-book won-me-over very quickly. The choice of Jason Watkins was inspired given his ease in navigating through the narrative and his fidelity to Atkinson’s writing. He selects and finely calibrates both his character voices and the need for humour, irony and wit. His sensitivity in touching moments is also very welcome. I did wonder why a novel with so many female characters why a male narrator was chosen, but I quickly gave that up and just went with the flow of this compelling novel. Do not linger at the door of decision about whether to choose ‘Shrines of Gaiety’ as your next listen. Just jump in.

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1 person found this helpful

immediately engaging

Engaging from the very first paragraph until the very last line. What I loved about this book aside from the wonderful glimpses it provides of life after the Great War, were the parallel stories of the characters. Their longings, hopes, opportunities missed, opportunities seized, their failings, their triumphs, the inevitable consequences of some actions, the randomness of other events in their lives. Witnessing their journey was a thing of beauty. We are all on a journey, destination unknown.

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Thoroughly enjoyable

Enjoyed this story very much, woven around Soho in the 1920s. Wonderful characters and loved the narration too, including all of the accents.

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Superb!

Such a good book and I think the narration is probably the best I’ve listened to on Audible, and I’ve listened to over 200 books.

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An interesting ending despite many loose ends

this was certainly an interesting read/ listen, although I am a bit concerned about the close adherence to real events and other books and therefore wonder how original this book is.

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Loved it

I adore Kate Atkinson style of writing, and this book was no exception. Glorious, from start to finish.

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Great listen

I couldn’t stop listening!
My mother was a young woman during this period and I grew up with a lot of the references (Bero cook book!), but I loved the use of the English language and vocabulary which invoked the essence of the period and the whole story.

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