Best selling sci-fi/fantasy audio-books – October 2009 – Audible.co.uk
October 2009 sees some exciting new audio books enter the top 10. Not content with having the #1 spot Audrey Niffenegger now has another title winging its way towards with top with Her Fearful Symmetry entering at #10. Iain Banks’s Transition enters the list in an impressive 2nd place while Terry Pratchett’s 37th Discworld novel Unseen Academicals is already proving very popular.
- The Time Traveller’s Wife (Unabridged) by Audrey Niffenegger
- Transition (Unabridged) by Iain Banks
- Twilight: The Twilight Saga, Book 1 (Unabridged) by Stephenie Meyer
- The Year of the Flood (Unabridged) by Margaret Atwood
- New Moon: The Twilight Saga, Book 2 (Unabridged) by Stephenie Meyer
- Breaking Dawn: The Twilight Saga, Book 4 (Unabridged) by Stephenie Meyer
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Unabridged) by Susanna Clarke
- Dune (Unabridged) by Frank Herbert
- Unseen Academicals: Discworld #37 by Terry Pratchett
- Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
Here is a little bit more information about the new entries Transition, The Year of the Flood and Her Fearful Symmetry.
Transition, by Iain Banks; narrated by Peter Kenny
A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers?
On the Concern’s books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a nameless, faceless torturer known only as the Philosopher. And then there’s the renegade Mrs Mulverhill, who recruits rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, hiding out from a dirty past in a forgotten hospital ward.
As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.
The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood; narrated by Lorelei King
Adam One, the kindly leader of the God’s Gardeners – a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, the preservation of all species, and the tending of the Earth – has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life.
Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned Gardener, Toby, barricaded into a luxurious spa. Have others survived? And what are the odds for the human race?
By turn’s dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most effective.
Her Fearful Symmetry, by Audrey Niffenegger; narrated by Sian Thomas
Julia and Valentina Poole are normal American teenagers – normal, at least, for identical ‘mirror’ twins who have no interest in college or jobs or possibly anything outside their cosy suburban home. But everything changes when they receive notice that an aunt whom they didn’t know existed has died and left them her flat in an apartment block overlooking Highgate Cemetery in London. They feel that at last their own lives can begin…but have no idea that they’ve been summoned into a tangle of fraying lives, from the obsessive-compulsive crossword setter who lives above them to their aunt’s mysterious and elusive lover who lives below them, and even to their aunt herself, who never got over her estrangement from the twins’ mother – and who can’t even seem to quite leave her flat….
With Highgate Cemetery itself a character and echoes of Henry James and Charles Dickens, Her Fearful Symmetry is a delicious and deadly 21st-century ghost story about Niffenegger’s familiar themes of love, loss, and identity. It is certain to cement her standing as one of the most singular and remarkable novelists of our time.
Posted: October 15th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: Audio-books, Stephenie Meyer, Susanna Clarke, Terry Pratchett
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Book of the Month
Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill
Some doors are better left closed . . . In Barrington House, an upmarket block in London, there is an empty apartment. No one goes in, no one comes out. And it’s been that way for fifty years. Until the night watchman hears a disturbance after midnight and investigates. What he experiences is enough to change his life forever.
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