As I mentioned in my post about my future plans, I’m going to have a break from blog tours to make my way through my personal TBR pile. I thought I’d start with a sci fi series of four novellas and a novel by Martha Wells, the Murderbot Diaries.
Category Archives: Audiobook
Audiobook Review: Fresh Eggs and Dog Beds 2, by Nick Albert
Fresh Eggs and Dog Beds 2 – Still living the dream in rural Ireland
Nick and Lesley’s desire for a better life in the countryside was a long-held dream. Unforeseen events and a leap of faith forced that dream into reality, but moving to rural Ireland was only the beginning of their story.
Foreigners in a foreign land, they set about making new friends, learning the culture and expanding their collection of chickens and unruly dogs. But their dream home was in desperate need of renovation, a mammoth task they attacked with the aid of a DIY manual, dwindling funds and incompetent enthusiasm. With defunct diggers, collapsing ladders, and shocking electrics, what could possibly go wrong?
Will their new life live up to expectations, or will the Irish weather, dangerous roads, and a cruel twist of fate turn this dream into a nightmare?
Purchase Links
Amazon UK
Kindle https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07DFNF3K4/
Paperback https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1721005226/
Audible https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0844YCGSS/
Amazon USA
Kindle https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07DFNF3K4/
Paperback https://www.amazon.com/dp/1721005226/
Audible https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0844GYPSQ/
Continue reading “Audiobook Review: Fresh Eggs and Dog Beds 2, by Nick Albert”Audiobook Review: The Road Not Taken, by Paul Dodgson
- Paperback: 288 pages
- Publisher: Unbound (22 Aug. 2019)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1783527757
- ISBN-13: 978-1783527755
Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Road-Not-Taken-memoir-about/dp/1783527757
BLURB
On the Road Not Taken is a memoir about the transformational power of music. It begins with a boy growing up in a small town on the Kent coast in the 1970s, who learns to play the guitar and dreams of heading out on the open road with a head full of songs. But when the moment comes to make the choice he is not brave enough to try and do it for a living.
Time passes but the desire to explain the world through music never goes away. And as the years go by it gets harder and harder to risk looking like a fool, of doing the very thing he would most like to do, of actually being himself. Eventually, thirty-five years later, when it feels like time is running out, he walks out onto a stage in front of 500 people and begins to sing again.
What follows is an extraordinary period of self-discovery as he plays pubs, clubs, theatres and festivals, overcoming anxiety to experience the joy of performance.
Continue reading “Audiobook Review: The Road Not Taken, by Paul Dodgson”Audiobook Review: Back To Reality, by Mark Stay & Mark Oliver
The bestselling ’90s nostalgia time travel comedy
Jo’s world is about to change forever, and it’s about time
Her marriage is on auto-pilot, daughter hates her, job sucks and it’s not even Tuesday.
As Jo’s life implodes, a freak event hurls her back to ‘90s Los Angeles where, in a parallel universe, she’s about to hit the big time as a rock star.
Jo has to choose between her dreams and her family in an adventure that propels her from London to Hollywood then Glastonbury, the world’s greatest music festival.
Jo encounters a disgraced guru, a movie star with a fetish for double-decker buses, and the biggest pop star in the world… who just happens to want to kill her.
Back to Reality is a funny, heartwarming story about second chances, with a heroine to rival Bridget Jones and the rock n roll nostalgia of Keith A Pearson.
The novel from the Bestseller Experiment podcast presenters Mark Stay and Mark Desvaux. The Two Marks went to more gigs in the ’90s than in any other decade and are currently working on a time machine to see Prince in concert.
Amazon 🇬🇧 https://amzn.to/2TXFVOu
Amazon 🇺🇸 https://amzn.to/2TR1IaF
Audiobook Review: The Wreckage, by Robin Morgan-Bentley
One fatal crash. Two colliding worlds. Three wrecked lives.
School teacher Ben is driving on the motorway, on his usual commute to work.
A day like any other…
Except for one man who, in a final despairing act, jumps in front of Ben’s car, turning the teacher’s world upside down in a single horrifying instant…
Wracked with guilt and desperate to clear his conscience, he develops a friendship with Alice, the dead man’s wife, and her 7-year-old son Max.
But as he tries to escape the trauma of the wreckage, could he go too far in trying to make amends?
How would you cope, knowing you’d caused someone’s death?
Audiobook Published: February 6th 2020 by Trapeze
My Review
I was sent a digital copy of this audiobook by the publisher as part of the blog tour and in return for an honest review. Not sure they’ll send me others because I’m not going to be entirely positive about this book.
I liked the premise, it’s a good ‘what if’, and the characters are very different from each other, different backgrounds and histories that are part of the text. The narration, and the voice actors, was very good. I got a lot from the intonation and pronunciation. A lot of background information beyond the text, from listening to the way the narrators embodied the characters.
The setting is very clear – middle class, middle of the road, middle England. The characters fit the setting. Ben’s parents are really quite funny in a ‘Mrs Bucket’ sort of way.
Unfortunately, the plot wasn’t as defined as the setting and characters. It didn’t seem to have a direction or any thrust, it meandered. Alice and Ben are deeply unlikeable people. Alice is damaged and unpleasant, and Ben is immature and stalkery. Now, normally I would have just found that fascinating and want to see how things would turn out, because complex characters are more interesting that simple ones and a good strong plot can do wonders with those, but they just didn’t interest me, it fell flat. That is, I think the author tried too hard to make them ‘complex’ and ‘interesting’. And Max is way too perfect to be real. And that ‘trying too hard’ put me off.
This book didn’t work for me. Might work for someone else and it certainly got a lot of 4 and 5 stars on GoodReads, so it could just be a personal taste thing.
Audiobook Review: Never Look Back, by A. L. Gaylin
She was the most brutal killer of our time. And she may have been my mother…
When website columnist Robin Diamond is contacted by true crime podcast producer Quentin Garrison, she assumes it’s a business matter. It’s not. Quentin’s podcast, Closure, focuses on a series of murders in the 1970s, committed by teen couple April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy. It seems that Quentin has reason to believe Robin’s own mother may be intimately connected with the killings.
Robin thinks Quentin’s claim is absurd. But is it? The more she researches the Cooper/LeRoy murders herself, the more disturbed she becomes by what she finds. Living just a few blocks from her, Robin’s beloved parents are the one absolute she’s always been able to rely upon, especially now amid rising doubts about her husband and frequent threats from internet trolls. Robin knows her mother better than anyone.
But then her parents are brutally attacked, and Robin realises she doesn’t know the truth at all…
Audiobook Review: The Wives, by Tarryn Fisher
You’ve never met the other wives. None of you know each other, and because of this unconventional arrangement, you can see your husband only one day a week. But you love him so much you don’t care. Or at least that’s what you’ve told yourself.
But one day, while you’re doing laundry, you find a scrap of paper in his pocket—an appointment reminder for a woman named Hannah, and you just know it’s another of the wives.
You thought you were fine with your arrangement, but you can’t help yourself: you track her down, and, under false pretenses, you strike up a friendship. Hannah has no idea who you really are. Then, Hannah starts showing up to your coffee dates with telltale bruises, and you realize she’s being abused by her husband. Who, of course, is also your husband. But you’ve never known him to be violent, ever.
Who exactly is your husband, and how far would you go to find the truth? Would you risk your own life?
And who is his mysterious third wife?
Published by: HarperCollins
Published: December 2019
Audiobook Review: The Townhouse Massacre’ by Ryan Green
“It just wasn’t their night.” (Richard Speck)
On the evening of July 13, 1966, an intoxicated Richard Speck broke into a townhouse at 2319 East 100th Street in Chicago to rob a group of student nurses. Speck woke the residents and ordered them into a room, calmly requesting money in exchange for their safety. The young women obliged. They believed that he was just going to take the money and leave, but Speck had other plans.
He tied them all up with strips of bed linen and led one of the girls into a separate room to “talk alone”. The situation took a turn for the worse when two more resident nurses burst into the townhouse, surprising Speck in the act. What transpired in the following hours would grip the nation with fear and forever change the perception of society.
The Townhouse Massacre is a chilling and gripping account of one of the most brutal and gruesome true crime stories in American history. Ryan Green’s riveting narrative draws the listener into the real-life horror experienced by the victims and has all the elements of a classic thriller.
Caution: This audiobook contains descriptive accounts of abuse and violence. If you are especially sensitive to this material, it might be advisable not to listen to this book.
Continue reading “Audiobook Review: The Townhouse Massacre’ by Ryan Green”Audiobook Review: ‘The Singularity Trap’, by Dennis E. Taylor
The number one best-selling author of the Bobiverse trilogy returns with a space thriller that poses a provocative question: Does our true destiny lie in ourselves – or in the stars?
If it were up to one man and one man alone to protect the entire human race – would you want it to be a down-on-his luck asteroid miner?
When Ivan Pritchard signs on as a newbie aboard the Mad Astra, it’s his final, desperate stab at giving his wife and children the life they deserve. He can survive the hazing of his crewmates, and how many times, really, can near-zero g make you vomit? But there’s another challenge looming out there, in the farthest reaches of human exploration, that will test every man, woman and AI on the ship – and will force Ivan to confront the very essence of what makes him human.
My Review
Had I heard/read The Singularity Trap before any of Taylor’s other books I would definitely have sought out his other works, because the writing is still good and characters interesting. The thriller element comes out well, and the central plot of Ivan becoming a metal man and the risk of annihilation by either A.I. or the Computer and its Masters, is gripping. I was really rooting for Ivan and the crew of the Mad Astra. The Naval command drove me up the wall, being pompous hawks. I liked the solution to the problem of what to do about the threat from the Computer and its development as an individual sharing a body with Ivan.
But…
This is my least favourite Dennis E. Taylor novel. I’ve only got it on audio book and I’m not particularly bothered about ordering the paperback, even though it would go nicely beside my Bobiverse books, along with Outland when it’s published in a couple of months. I don’t know if it’s because Ray Porter narrates them all so they feel like alternative universes. A lot of the characters have similar names. The main characters are all engineers/computer scientists and feel like the same character re-imagined in different circumstances. The Bobiverse books and Outland are sufficiently different that you can’t get them confused – apart from the coffee obsession. The Singularity Trap and the Bobiverse are quite similar, they could be alternative futures had the events described in We Are Legion (We Are Bob) as happening after Bob dies and before he is uploaded, been slightly different. Unfortunately these similarities kept distracting me from the qualities of the book itself.
Audiobook Review: ‘Outland’, by Dennis E. Taylor
Purchase Link
Continue reading “Audiobook Review: ‘Outland’, by Dennis E. Taylor”Blurb
When the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, it’s up to six college students and their experimental physics project to prevent the end of civilization.
When an experiment to study quantum uncertainty goes spectacularly wrong, physics student Bill Rustad and his friends find that they have accidentally created an inter-dimensional portal. They connect to Outland – an alternate Earth with identical geology, but where humans never evolved. The group races to establish control of the portal before the government, the military, or evildoers can take it away.
Then everything changes when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts in an explosion large enough to destroy civilization and kill half the planet. The team has just hours to get as many people as possible across to Outland before a lethal cloud of ash overwhelms them.
Nothing has prepared the refugees for what they find – a world of few resources and unprecedented dangers. Somehow, they must learn to survive, because Outland may not just be a safe haven – it could be their new home.
Everything Is Better With Dragons 