Cover 7

Strangers

Strangers

2009 • 309 pages

Ratings2

Average rating3

15

Producers of audio books, please, please try harder to choose your readers carefully. If a story is set abroad ( in this case Britain), you need a narrator from that country. You may have found an actor who can “do” a foreign accent well enough to amuse their friends for 2 minutes. This does not qualify them to read convincingly in that accent for 14 hours. Tilly Hooper obviously has a pleasant voice - I can hear that in the introduction. Thereafter, it was excruciating to listen to her because she was obviously struggling so hard to force sounds that don't come naturally to her. I hope she was paid well, because it was obviously torture for her, and it would have been torture for me too if I hadn't given up after the first twenty minutes.

If you can't get a native of the country in which the story is set to read it, then just let your reader narrate in their own accent. Maybe it wouldn't be correct, but it wouldn't be as bad as this. I will have to read this instead.