Claire Tomalin has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 6 ratings. The most-rated is Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens
Summary
The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Read by the actor Alex Jennings. Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonically hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more. At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve. Alex Jennings is an associate actor with the RSC and has also worked with the Royal National Theatre. He was Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for which he won the second of his Olivier Awards for Best Actor in a Musical. He played Charles, Prince of Wales in the film The Queen, and his TV appearances include The State Within, Inspector Morse and the title role in Ashenden. He's a prolific reader of audiobooks, the most notable of which are The Horse and his Boy, Oliver Twist and Attention All Shipping.
©2011 Claire Tomalin (P)2011 Penguin Books Limited
Samuel Pepys
Summary
Samuel Pepys kept a diary in which he wrote with astonishing candour about the life he saw around him in London in the 1660s, and about his private desires and ambitions. The diary was kept for fewer than 10 years of his long life: Claire Tomalin tells the whole story of the Fleet Street tailor's son who made himself rich and powerful, an MP and adviser to royalty. She also traces his relations with many women, from countesses to servant girls, in a biography that is funny, moving, and as candid as Pepys himself.
©2002 Claire Tomalin (P)2002 Penguin Books Ltd
Thomas Hardy
Summary
Today Thomas Hardy is best known for creating the employing the great Wessex landscape as the backdrop to his rural novels, beginning with Far from the Madding Crowd, and making them classics. But his true legacy is that of a progressive thinker. When he published Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure late in his career, Hardy explored a very different world than that of his rural tales, one in which the plight of the lower classes and women took center stage, while the higher classes were damned. Ironically, though, Hardy remained safe in the arms of this same upper class during the publication of these books, acting at all times in complete convention with the rules of society. Was he using his books to express himself in a way he felt unable to in the company he kept, or did he know sensationalism would sell? Award-winning author Claire Tomalin expertly reconstructs the life that led Hardy to maintain conventionality while promoting revolution in his writing. Hardy's work consistently challenged sexual and religious conventions in a way that few other authors of the time dared. Though his personal modesty and kindness allowed some to underestimate him, or even to pity him, they did not prevent him from taking on the central themes of human experience: time, memory, loss, love, fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, death. And it was exactly his quiet life, full of the small, personal dramas of family quarrels, rivalries, and, at times, despair, that infuses his works with the rich detail that sets them apart as masterpieces. In this engrossing biography, Tomalin skillfully identifies the inner demons and the outer mores that drove Hardy and presents a rich and complex portrait of one of the greatest figures in English literature.
©2007 Claire Tomalin (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.