A rewarding 33-hour and 53-minute listen!

I started listening to this audiobook because I had just finished listening to 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies'. As a recent convert to the cult of Hilary Mantel, I had to listen to another one of her historical novels, but 'The Mirror and the Light' was still a couple of months away.

While the length of the book did seem forbidding, Jonathan Keeble's nuanced narration of Mantel's delightful prose ensured that I rarely tired of listening to it. And the final chapters, especially the last one, is so vividly written that I was almost numb at the tragedy that had just unfolded in my ears. This, despite the fact that I well know what had happened in history.

Since I listened to it after listening to her Booker Prize-winning novels, I could not stop comparing it with them. And it does come up short, though not by much. This novel has three protagonists as opposed to the one in her Cromwell novels, forcing her to take the reader from one to the other to the third and back. And because this novel is situated in the French Revolution, she frequently has to take the reader away from even the protagonists' points of view to give them a sense of what was happening in Paris at the time. All of this diffuses the story, something that does not happen in her Cromwell novels. Nevertheless, her writing is still recognisable and still a marvel, and compelling enough to sustain you through the story.

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