Frederick Davidson has narrated 71 audiobooks on Listento.it by 51 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.4★ across 443 ratings. The most-rated is War and Peace.
Penguin Island
Summary
Penguin Island is Anatole France’s most searching and satirical novel. A humorous critique of customs and laws, rituals and rites, its subject is human nature, but its characters are penguins in the mythical land of Penguinia. The story of the strutting penguins and their virtues and vices is not merely a burlesque allegory of French history, but a satire of the history of mankind. With gentle yet biting irony, France challenges the Spencerian belief in the ultimate perfectibility of man, though his irony reveals his sympathy for man’s weaknesses and his need for social institutions. First published in 1908, Penguin Island is widely regarded as Anatole France’s masterpiece.
Public Domain (P)1998 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Dead Room Farce
Summary
It's not Beckett exactly, but a three-month run of Not on Your Wife!, a new farce by the prolific British farceur Bill Blunden, is not to be sniffed at by a jobbing actor. Which is why Charles Paris is standing on stage with his trousers around his ankles, playing Aubrey, the older lover of GIlly, wife of Bob, whose young mistress Nicky he is passing off as the property of his neighbor Ted. Rehearsals have gone well, the laughs are coming, and if his marriage is on the skids again there's always the consolation of Bell's - and the uncertain attractions of aging ingenue Cookie Stone. But by the time the troupe reaches Bath a darker mood has set in. Cookie Stone seems to think she and Charles are practically married (if only he could remember what happened!), and Charles' old friend Mark, who runs a recording studio in Bath where Charles is making a talking book, has a drinking problem that amounts to a death wish. But it's not the drink that kills Mark, it's somebody in the cast who has a dirty little secret that Mark must not be allowed to reveal...
©1997 by Simon Brett (P)1999 by Blackstone Audiobooks
Three Men on the Bummel
Summary
"A 'Bummel,'" I explained, "I should describe as a journey, long or short, without end." However wonderful this may sound, it is often necessary to arrive back at the starting point. And, for the three fearless friends whose earlier adventures were told in Three Men in a Boat, this poses a troublesome problem. George, Harris, and J. decide to take a cycling trip through the Black Forest - to be accomplished on a tandem plus one. Whether it is Harris's harrowing experience with a Hanoverian road-waterer or George's valiant attempt to buy a cushion for his aunt, their experiences are hilarious - - and they may even offer some important lessons to all who may be contemplating a cycling trip in the U.S.
Public Domain (P)1991 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Good Detective
Summary
A case from his past is about to ruin Assistant Chief Constable Ned French's career. Heather Jonas, forced into a false confession to murder after a harrowing late-night interview session with French, has now served 15 years of her 20-year sentence. In all that time she's never appealed against her lot; but now, someone else has confessed, and a citizen's rights campaigner is determined to get to the truth. Then, French gets a tip-off which could lead to the biggest coup of his working life. He is reliably informed that the notorious Corrigan cousins are masterminding a huge shipment of cocaine into Britain, and he knows where it's going to land. Will he be able to pull off the arrest, or will the events from his past overwhelm him before he has the chance? And is he, or is he not, a good detective?
©1995 H. R. F. Keating (P)1995 Blacksone Audio, Inc.
Rumpole's Last Case
Summary
Rumpole is on the job again, bringing along his taste for claret, his penchant for poetry, and his reputation for a good story. These seven irresistible stories run the gamut from simple thievery to murder and espionage. Rumpole recalls three delightful battles with his arch-enemy, the Mad Bull; indulges his knowledge of bloodstains and typewriters; and uses the refined taste of a garage mechanic to discover the reasons for the robbery of a case of wine. As usual, Rumpole's biting wit and benevolent ideas of justice push the Mad Bull to the edge of retaliation, and it is only through some last minute diplomatic intervention that Rumpole lives to argue another day.
©1987 Advanpress, Ltd (P)1995 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Stalin
Summary
Of all the despots of our time, Joseph Stalin lasted the longest and wielded the greatest power, and his secrets have been the most jealously guarded - even after his death. In this book, the first to draw from recently released archives, Robert Conquest gives us Stalin as a child and student; as a revolutionary and communist theoretician; as a political animal skilled in amassing power and absolutely ruthless in maintaining it. He presents the landmarks of Stalin's rule: the clash with Lenin; collectivization; the Great Terror; the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Nazi-Soviet war; the anti-Semitic campaign that preceded his death; and the legacy he left behind. Distilling a lifetime's study, weaving detail, analysis, and research, Conquest has given us an extraordinarily powerful narrative of this incredible figure.
©1991 Robert Conquest (P)1992 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Catriona
Summary
Catriona, first published in 1893, is the sequel to Kidnapped and continues the adventures of David Balfour and his friend Alan Breck. Balfour returns to the city in order to defend Breck against false charges in the Appin murder. In so doing, he becomes a pawn in a game between feuding Scottish clans; he also sets eyes on a young woman whose involvement in the same matter becomes as central to his actions as his desire to vindicate his comrade in arms.
(P)1997 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Great Hunger
Summary
The Great Hunger is the story of one of the worst disasters in world history: the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s. Within five years, one million people died of starvation. Emigrants by the hundreds of thousands sailed for America and Canada in small, ill-equipped, dangerously unsanitary ships. Some ships never arrived; those that did carried passengers already infected with and often dying of typhus. The Irish who managed to reach the United States alive had little or no money and were often too weak to work. They crowded into dirty cellars, begged, and took whatever employment they could get. Epidemics, riots, and chaos followed in their wake. The Great Hunger is a heartbreaking story of suffering, insensitivity, and blundering stupidity; yet it is also an epic tale of courage, dignity, and - despite all odds - a hardly supportable optimism. Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (1896-1977) was a British historian and biographer. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era.
©1962 Cecil Woodham-Smith (P)1998 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Rumpole and the Golden Thread
Summary
In this engaging collection of stories, Rumpole continues to deftly juggle the vagaries of law, the ambiguities of crime, and the contradictions of the human heart in his death-defying performances on behalf of justice. The irreverent, claret-swilling, poetry-spouting barrister takes on suspect connoisseurs in the art world, journeys deep into the throbbing heart of Africa, dabbles in some feminist politics, decides the countryside is a very dangerous place, and incurs the wrath of his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed.
©1983 Advanpress, Ltd. (P)2000 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Kidnapped
Summary
In this spirited and romantic saga, a young heir named David Balfour meets his miserly uncle Ebenezer, who has illegally taken control of the Balfour estate. Ebenezer kidnaps David and plots to have him seized and sold into slavery on a ship to the Carolinas. A couple of days into the voyage, a shipwreck throws David together with David Break, a Scotsman returning from political exile in France, and the two of them journey together. They are witnesses to the murder of Colin Campbell, the "Rio Fox" of Glenure, and suspicion falls on them. What follows is a perilous journey across the Highlands. Kidnapped is a classic of high adventure.
(P)1989 Blackstone Audiobooks
The Gulag Archipelago, Volume 1
Summary
"Best nonfiction book of the 20th century." (Time) Volume one of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. "The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." (George F. Kennan) "It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late 20th century." (David Remnick, The New Yorker) "Solzhenitsyn’s masterpiece.... The Gulag Archipelago helped create the world we live in today." (Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag: A History, from the foreword)
©2015 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers