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Black Chalk

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Black Chalk

By: Christopher J. Yates
Narrated by: Peter Brooke
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One game. Six students. Five survivors.

It was only ever meant to be a game.

A game of consequences, of silly forfeits, childish dares. A game to be played by six best friends in their first year at Oxford University. But then the game changed: the stakes grew higher and the dares more personal, more humiliating, finally evolving into a vicious struggle with unpredictable and tragic results.

Now, fourteen years later, the remaining players must meet again for the final round.

 Suspense Thriller & Suspense Game Fiction
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Critic reviews

An inventive and intricate psychological puzzle thriller that mystifies, torments, disturbs, beguiles... a powerfully intelligent debut (Marcel Berlins)
A compulsive page-turner that will hold your attention until the very last word (Natasha Harding)
Sinister, addictive and unpredictable – this is a novel to be devoured greedily, at speed, but one that will leave its footprint on your memory for far longer (Natasha Lunn)
Yates’s take on the collegiate thriller lives up to early comparisons to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History... filled with gleeful malevolence
[A] chilling debut...this is a thriller, a cautionary tale and a sobering exploration of unintended consequences rolled into one
Black Chalk grabs from the get-go... Yates plots with tantalizing skill (Ellen Shapiro)
This addictive psychological thriller will have you hooked from start to game over
Compelling (John O'Connell)
A truly chilling thriller, with campus-fun-gone-wrong echoes of Donna Tartt's The Secret History
A very exciting debut - like The Secret History, but so much creepier... This is intellectually challenging psychological thriller writing at a high level
All stars
Most relevant
Unsatisfying altogether. It takes a great deal of skill to carry off this kind of tale. Sadly lacking in this case. The representation of Oxford is very thin. All the rest quite dull.

Should be listed under young adult fiction, I think

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I found the narrator’s voice extremely grating. The story may have been ok but I had to stop listening early on. I think this may be better to read as a book.

Painful

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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

I enjoyed the book, but the narration wasn't great, some of the accents were dubious to say the least! Glad I stuck with it though.

How could the performance have been better?

Better narration, less trying to act the parts

Unusual but worth a listen

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Is there anything you would change about this book?

I wanted this to be more like The Secret History but it just wasn't as good at all, I found it a bit grating.

If this book were a film would you go see it?

Maybe, a director could possibly bring this story to life in a different way.

Not quite Tartt

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I finally got around to listening to this when searching through my library for an author that I haven’t tried before. I managed to listen for exactly three hours before giving up. There are a few narrators that I just cannot tolerate and I’ve added Peter Brooke to that list. I can’t place his accent but I assumed he’s from the USA, until UK vowel sounds appeared in the narration. The UK voice characterisations of Oxford students are ridiculous. As for the story itself, nothing of any interest or consequence happens in the first three hours. I’m not a fan of the c word and it just sounds jarring in this context and read by this narrator. I won’t be listening to anything else involving this writer or narrator.

Black Chalk on my black list.

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