Blog

Top 10 fantasy audio-book downloads (November 2010)

Below is a list of the top 10 science fiction and fantasy audio-books downloaded on www.audible.co.uk during November 2010.

  1. Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist (Unabridged)
    Oskar and Eli. In very different ways, they were both victims. Which is why, against the odds, they became friends – and how they came to depend on one another for life itself.  Oskar is a 12-year-old boy living with his mother on a dreary housing estate at the city’s edge. He dreams about his absentee father, gets bullied at school, and wets himself when he’s frightened. Eli is the young girl who’s moved in next door. She doesn’t go to school and never leaves the flat by day. She is a 200-year-old vampire, forever frozen in childhood, and condemned to live on a diet of fresh blood. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel is a huge best seller in his native Sweden – a unique and brilliant fusion of social novel and vampire legend. It is also a deeply moving fable about rejection, friendship, and loyalty.
  2. Towers of Midnight, Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson (Unabridged)
    The Last Battle has started. The seals on the Dark One’s prison are crumbling. The Pattern itself is unravelling, and the armies of the Shadow have begun to boil out of the Blight. The sun has begun to set upon the Third Age. Perrin Aybara is now hunted by spectres from his past: Whitecloaks, a slayer of wolves, and the responsibilities of leadership. All the while, an unseen foe is slowly pulling a noose tight around his neck. To prevail, he must seek answers in Tel’aran’rhiod and find a way – at long last – to master the wolf within him or lose himself to it forever. Meanwhile, Matrim Cauthon prepares for the most difficult challenge of his life. The creatures beyond the stone gateways – the Aelfinn and the Eelfinn – have confused him, taunted him, and left him hanged, his memory stuffed with bits and pieces of other men’s lives. He had hoped that his last confrontation with them would be the end of it, but the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.  The time is coming when he will again have to dance with the Snakes and the Foxes, playing a game that cannot be won. The Tower of Ghenjei awaits, and its secrets will reveal the fate of a friend long lost. This penultimate novel of Robert Jordan’s number-one New York Times best-selling series – the second of three based on materials he left behind when he died in 2007 – brings dramatic and compelling developments to many threads in the Pattern. The end draws near. Dovie’andi se tovya sagain. It’s time to toss the dice….
  3. Dark Matter, Michelle Paver (Unabridged)
    January 1937. Jack Miller has just about run out of options. His shoes have worn through, he can’t afford to heat his rented room in Tooting, and he longs to use his training as a specialist wireless operator instead of working in his dead-end job. When he is given the chance to join an arctic expedition, as communications expert, by a group of elite Oxbridge graduates, he brushes off his apprehensions and convinces himself to join them. As the young men set sail from a gloomy Britain on the verge of war, Jack feels the overwhelming excitement of not knowing what lies ahead. Little can he imagine the horrors that await him in their destination, Gruhuken, a place that cannot escape the savage echo of its past.
  4. Surface Detail, Iain M. Banks (Unabridged)
    The dazzling new Culture novel from a modern master of science fiction – a tour de force of brilliant storytelling, world-building and imagination. It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters. It begins with a murder. And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself. Lededje Y’breq is one of the Intagliated, her marked body bearing witness to a family shame, her life belonging to a man whose lust for power is without limit. Prepared to risk everything for her freedom, her release, when it comes, is at a price, and to put things right she will need the help of the Culture. Benevolent, enlightened and almost infinitely resourceful though it may be, the Culture can only do so much for any individual. With the assistance of one of its most powerful – and arguably deranged – warships, Lededje finds herself heading into a combat zone not even sure which side the Culture is really on. A war – brutal, far-reaching – is already raging within the digital realms that store the souls of the dead, and it’s about to erupt into reality. It started in the realm of the Real and that is where it will end. It will touch countless lives and affect entire civilizations, but at the centre of it all is a young woman whose need for revenge masks another motive altogether.
  5. The Passage, Justin Cronin (Unabridged)
    Amy Harper Bellafonte is six years old, and her mother thinks she’s the most important person in the whole world. She is…. Anthony Carter doesn’t think he could ever be in a worse place than Death Row…. He’s wrong. FBI agent Brad Wolgast thinks something beyond imagination is coming…. It is. The Passage. Deep in the jungles of eastern Colombia, Professor Jonas Lear has finally found what he’s been searching for – and wishes to God he hadn’t. In Memphis, Tennessee, a six-year-old girl called Amy is left at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy and wonders why her mother has abandoned her. In a maximum security jail in Nevada, a convicted murderer called Giles Babcock has the same strange nightmare, over and over again, while he waits for a lethal injection. In a remote community in the California mountains, a young man called Peter waits for his beloved brother to return home – so he can kill him. Bound together in ways they cannot comprehend, for each of them a door is about to open into a future they could not have imagined. And a journey is about to begin. An epic journey that will take them through a world transformed by man’s darkest dreams, to the very heart of what it means to be human. And beyond. The Passage.
  6. Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks (Unabridged)
    The first Culture novel, now available as an unabridged audio download. The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction – cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender. Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction. Consider Phlebas is a space opera of stunning power and awesome imagination.
  7. The Fall, Guillermo del Toro, Chuck Hogan (Unabridged)
    The tension-filled sequel to The Strain, from the world-famous director whose films include Pan’s Labyrinthe and Hellboy. Humans have been displaced at the top of the food chain, and now understand – to their outright horror – what it is to be not the consumer, but the consumed. Ephraim Goodweather, director of the New York office of the Centers for Disease control, is one of the few humans who understands what is really happening. Vampires have arrived in New York City, and their condition is contagious. If they cannot be contained, the entire world is at risk of infection. As Eph becomes consumed with the battle against the total corruption of humanity, his ex-wife, Kelly, now a vampire herself, is ever-more determined to claim their son, Zack. As the Biblical origins of the Ancient ones are gradually revealed, Eph learns that there is a greater, more terrible plan in store for the human race – worse even than annihilation….
  8. The Evolutionary Void, Peter F Hamilton (Unabridged)
    Peter F. Hamilton’s startling perspectives on tomorrow’s technological and cultural trends span vast tracts of space and time, his stories are as compelling as they are epic in scope, and yet they are always grounded in characters – human, alien and other – who, for all their strangeness, still touch our hearts and fire our imaginations. Now, in The Evolutionary Void, Hamilton concludes the highly acclaimed Commonwealth saga that has unfolded in The Dreaming Void and The Temporal Void.
  9. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke (Unabridged)
    Shortlisted for Audible’s Listen of the Year, 2006. English magicians were once the wonder of the known world, with fairy servants at their beck and call; they could command winds, mountains, and woods. But by the early 1800s they have long since lost the ability to perform magic. They can only write long, dull papers about it, while fairy servants are nothing but a fading memory. But at Hurtfew Abbey in Yorkshire, the rich, reclusive Mr. Norrell has assembled a wonderful library of lost and forgotten books from England’s magical past and regained some of the powers of England’s magicians. He goes to London and raises a beautiful young woman from the dead. Soon he is lending his help to the government in the war against Napoleon Bonaparte, creating ghostly fleets of rain-ships to confuse and alarm the French. All goes well until a rival magician appears. Jonathan Strange is handsome, charming, and talkative, the very opposite of Mr. Norrell. Strange thinks nothing of enduring the rigors of campaigning with Wellington’s army and doing magic on battlefields. Astonished to find another practicing magician, Mr. Norrell accepts Strange as a pupil. But it soon becomes clear that their ideas of what English magic ought to be are very different… Sophisticated, witty, and ingeniously convincing, Susanna Clarke’s magisterial novel weaves magic into a flawlessly detailed vision of historical England. She has created a world so thoroughly enchanting that 32 hours leave readers longing for more.
  10. Red Dwarf: Better Than Life, Grant Naylor (Unabridged)
    Red Dwarf – Better Than Life is the second and final instalment of this hilarious sci-fi comedy. Narrated by Chris "Rimmer" Barrie, Better Than Life finds the crew trapped in a mind-boggling computer game that is threatening their lives and safety of the ship. One by one, they enter the game to rescue each other – and one by one, they become trapped! Holly will have to use his mega brain to solve this one.

Comments

Antony
November 30th, 2010

Number 10, Better Than Life is NOT the second and final instalment of this Red Dwarf comedy. These two books are followed by two more. Backwards and The Last Human. Hope you enjoy these as much too. :)

Lee
December 6th, 2010

I hang my head in shame. Firstly, for copying and pasting. Secondly, I’ve read all 4 books, Backwards being mind-bendingly clever at the beginning. Must also mention that the books are 10 times better than the TV show (which itself is good) but don’t receive the literary acclaim they possibly should. And… Chris Barrie’s narration within the audiobooks is also fantastic – I have listened and re-listened to them for longer than I care remember – my first copy of Infinity Welcomes… was on audio tape!

Do you have something to add to this post? Please leave a comment