Review: NIGHT OVER WATER, Ken Follett - audio

• Audible Audiobook
• Listening Length: 18 hours and 41 minutes
• Program Type: Audiobook
• Version: Unabridged
• Publisher: Macmillan Digital Audio
• Narrator: Russell Bentley
• Audible.com.au Release Date: 23 August 2018

Synopsis (Amazon)

Set during the outbreak of the Second World War, Night over Water is a feat of storytelling from the best-selling master of the historical thriller, Ken Follett.

On a bright September morning in 1939, two days after Britain has declared war, a group of privileged but desperate people gather in Southampton to board the largest, most luxurious airliner ever built - the Pan American Clipper, bound for New York: an English aristocrat, fleeing with his family and a fortune in jewels; a German scientist, escaping from the Nazis; a murderer under FBI escort; a young wife running away from a domineering husband; and a handsome, unscrupulous thief....

My Take

War has just been declared and there are a number of people desperate to leave England for America. The novel tells the stories of these people, and why they want to leave, in a number of plot strands. Amid these strands a crew member's wife is abducted and he is under pressure to bring the flying boat down just off the New England coast.

The tension grows as the plane approaches the American coastline, but meanwhile we have learnt a lot about this luxurious airliner, and the details feel very authentic.

There are 15 discs in the set, with each running for a little over an hour. Takes up a lot of listening time.

I could have done without the gratuitous sex which felt a bit sleazy.

My rating: 4.4

I've also read WORLD WITHOUT END (Audio CD)

WORLD WITHOUT END, Ken Follett

In a previous post I talked about how I love to listen to audio books in the car. This 14 hour 12 CD set is an abridged version of the book (I discovered after listening to it) but it is wonderfully narrated by Richard E. Grant.

A sequel to Follett's very successful book THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH, WORLD WITHOUT END is set in the same cathedral town, Kingsbridge, two centuries later. The story begins just over two decades before the Black Death hit England in 1348. In some ways it is about how English towns emerged from the middle ages, from the dominance of people by the church, and the changes brought not only by pestilence, but also by European traders, and by war. On another level it traces the lives of four children who witness a murder in the forest in 1327, and how their lives interlace in the next 30 years. It gives a lovely insight to a very cataclysmic period of English history.

This is obviously not crime fiction, but my defence is that it has lots of little mysteries embedded in it. Besides Richard E. Grant's reading was magnificent!

Ken Follett's website

My rating: 4.7

Reading in the car, talking books

One of the things I really like doing is listening to a novel on CDs in the car, on my way to and from work. Unfortunately I don't have a long journey, about 20 mins in the morning and 30 in the afternoon.

So the current novel is taking quite a while. I'm listening to Ken Follett's WORLD WITHOUT END read beautifully by Richard E. Grant. It is an unabridged version, 12 CDs, each a little over an hour long, and I've just started number 10.

Basically the story is set in an English cathedral town beginning about a decade before the Black Death hit England in 1348. In some ways it is about how English towns emerged from the middle ages, from the dominance of people by the church, and the changes brought not only by pestilence, but also by European traders, and by war.

I'm finding it quite difficult to write about though. Someone on one of the discussion lists I'm on pointed out that although you actually "read" the book more slowly when someone reads it to you, you also don't have the opportunity to turn back the pages to check details that you didn't take in very well the first time. I'm finding also that when the spelling of a name is not very clear to me, I am having a problem in remembering them.

Despite all that, I'm enjoying Grant's reading, the saga like qualities of the story, and the historical detail.

Ken Follett has a website and I read there what he said about the book. I hadn't realised it was a sequel to PILLARS OF THE EARTH because it is such a long time since I have read that.

I couldn’t write another book about building a cathedral, because that would be the same book. And I couldn’t write another story about the same characters, because by the end of 'Pillars' they are all very old or dead. 'World Without End' takes place in the same town, Kingsbridge, and features the descendants of the 'Pillars' characters two centuries later.

The cathedral and the priory are again at the centre of a web of love and hate, greed and pride, ambition and revenge. But at the heart of the story is the greatest natural disaster ever to strike the human race: the plague known as the Black Death, which killed something like half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century. The people of the Middle Ages battled this lethal pestilence and survived – and, in doing so, laid the foundations of modern medicine.