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Waiting for Sunrise

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Waiting for Sunrise

By: William Boyd
Narrated by: Jack Rowan
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the enigmatic, intensely beautiful Hettie Bull walks in, Lysander is immediately drawn to her, unaware of how destructive the consequences of their subsequent affair will be. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous web of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life...

© William Boyd 2012 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 20th Century Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World War I Fiction England
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I’m confident that a 1910s West End actor would not have lost his ‘t’s in the middle of quite so many words. And I'm sure he'd know how to pronounce Folkestone. Perfect for a Nick Hornby but very, very distracting here. Ultimately made it almost impossible to suspend disbelief.

Spoiled by t glottalisation and mispronunciation

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narrator a bit irritating
several words mispronounced and not quite the accent for the officer upper class hero.
Otherwise very enjoyable and gripping

excellent story

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I don’t for one minute think British readers should all speak RP, but if a reader is going to assign accents to characters, then some historically-informed authenticity would help. Here, First World War British army officers are assigned a variety of regional working class accents that just doesn’t seem believable and which really detracts from the enjoyment of the boom. The main character too, speaks in an estuary drawl. I’m fine with the reader’s own London estuary accent for the narrative passages but for the dialogue someone should have directed him to be a bit more authentic.

Some poor accent choices

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Love Boyd. Beautifully set and crafted story. Narrator more suited to moving a Guy Ritchie movie along. As jarring as having East Enders played by 1940’s BBC news readers.

Strange choice of narrator

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It is a pity that the narration is so poor. It is monotonous without any feel, inflection or variance of tone. Nevertheless I stuck with it and eventually I became unaware of this problem. The story was quite interesting and had enough pace. Not the best work of fiction but I enjoyed it enough.

Poor Narration

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