Named by AudioFile magazine as one of the Best Audiobooks of 2005, this unforgettable audio performance represents the best of what the medium can do.
Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, the famous novelist born into one of America's intellectual first families two decades before the Civil War, and who left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, who never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart.
About the Author :
Colm Toibin is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic, and poet. His novel The Master won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His other books of fiction have earned similar awards and have been translated into numerous languages. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.
Ralph Cosham (1936-2014), a.k.a. Geoffrey Howard, was a British journalist who changed careers to become a narrator and screen and stage actor. He performed in more than one hundred professional theatrical roles, and several of his narrations were named Audio Best of the Year by Publishers Weekly. He won seven AudioFile Earphones Awards, and in 2013 he won the coveted Audie Award for Best Mystery Narration for his reading of Louise Penny's The Beautiful Mystery.
Review :
"[Ralph Cosham] takes the arguably cerebral story from the page and renders it a fully staged, walking, talking drama without a single false note, so you haven't just heard it, you feel you've seen it. Superb."
-- "AudioFile"
"A marvel."
-- "New Yorker"
"A sympathetic and triumphant novel of startling excellence."
-- "Observer (London)"
"Beautifully written, deeply pondered, startlingly un-Jamesian."
-- "New York Times Book Review"
"Even the reader who knows little about Henry James or his work can enjoy this marvelously intelligent and engaging novel...a beautifully nuanced psychological portrait."
-- "Booklist (starred review)"
"This is an audacious, profound, and wonderfully intelligent book."
-- "Guardian (London)"
"Toibin imagines, with vivid detail, members of James' circle--like his devoted manservant, Burgess Noakes--as well as James' feelings of guilt, regret, and homosexual longing."
-- "New York Times"
"The Master is a novel beautiful in what it doesn't say as much as for what it does say. It makes a seamless transition to audio via an excellent reader who gives depth to all that is unspoken."
-- "Audiobookstoday.com"
"The subtlety and empathy with which Tóibín inhabits James' psyche and captures the fleeting emotional nuances of his world are beyond praise...this is a riveting, if inevitably somewhat evasive, portrait of the creative life."
-- "Publishers Weekly"
