The Little Drummer Girl cover art

The Little Drummer Girl

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The Little Drummer Girl

By: John le Carré
Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Charlie, a jobbing young English actress, is accustomed to playing different roles. But when the mysterious, battle-scarred Joseph recruits her into the Israeli secret services, she enters the dangerous 'theatre of the real'. As she acts out her part in an intricate, high-stakes plot to trap and kill a Palestinian terrorist, it threatens to consume her.

Set in the tragic arena of the Middle East conflict, this compelling story of love and torn loyalties plays out against the backdrop of an unwinnable war.

'An exciting story, excitingly told' Observer

'Wonderful' The New York Times

©1983 John le Carré (P)2024 Penguin Audio Espionage Spies & Politics Thriller & Suspense Middle East Exciting War

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This is one of my favourite le Carre books, but the narration of the male characters was absolutely terrible. I couldn't even hazard a guess at what the female narrator was aiming for. Each foreign male character was delivered with exactly the same voice, It didn't matter if he was Israeli, German, Italian or Palestinian etc. Get a better narrator please. This was a joke. Avoid like the plague.

awful narration of great book

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Adjoa Andoh works hard with a lot of accents to juggle. I do like her but found it very hard to concentrate on the story for Andoh's distracting accents. A miss for me, I will look for the ones read by the author which I prefer.

So so version

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I have always loved this book. So I was looking forward to hearing it. Unfortunately the narrator Adjoa Andoh (maybe through lack of experience?) really destroyed the enjoyment. Her exaggerated foreign accents were way over the top, undermining any subtlety in the story. Her characterisation of the main character (Charlie) made it sound as if she was around 17 rather than a much more mature 26 (her age in the story). This was a great shame (after all Adjoa Andoh has a lovely voice; so why do a strange voice for the central character?). She also over emphasised practically every sentence, thus losing any nuance in understanding. Lastly she actually changed the language (which I found very surprising) when she (or the producer) didn't like it. Why do this? The book was written in the 1980s should be read as such.
I wrote to Audible to ask if I could download the Michael Jayston version instead but they never wrote back to me.

Pantomime narration destroys a wonderful book.

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