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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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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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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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This has to be the worst read book on Audible. I am surprised that Penguin (and William Boyd?) chose this actor to read it. Huge number of mispronunciations and a very irritating Cockney accent for virtually all the characters. All they did was jar and get in the way of the story.

William Boyd’s ‘Any Human Heart’ and ‘Restless’ are superb novels. I thought this was a much weaker effort with poor pacing and too much descriptive flannel which added little to the narrative drive of the story.

Final verdict- disappointing.

Appallingly read - disappointing story

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I love William Boyd’s work and yet again this is a beautifully researched yarn that twists and turns and takes the reader on a thrilling journey. However, they chose the wrong narrator and it’s gratingly distracting. Put simply, he has the wrong accent for an upper middle class protagonist so any dialogue voiced as the main character is utterly unconvincing. The narrator consistently mispronounces any word over 2 syllables, putting stresses on the wrong syllables and generally butchering the text.
He also, clearly, has never studied French which is a problem because there are a lot of French place names in the book. As a result I had to keep stopping and rewinding to try to decipher the narration. As I’m Welsh I found his mispronunciation of ‘Llanelli’ particularly awful. It’s not difficult to fix any of this, just check pronunciation with a native speaker.

Another Boyd tour de force but let down by narrator

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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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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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