Barbara Comyns Book Collection - Barbara Comyns Audiobook

Written by Barbara Comyns
Read by Katherine Press, Kristin Atherton, Madeleine Leslay
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead

That evening the baker’s wife ran down the village street in a tattered pink nightgown. She screamed as she ran.

Strange things are afoot in the English village where the Willoweed family live. First, the river floods in June. The family wakes to find ducks sailing around the drawing room and dead peacocks bobbing in the garden. But the flood is only the beginning of their troubles.

All of a sudden the miller goes mad and drowns himself. Then the butcher slits his throat. A peculiar illness is spreading through the town and picking off its victims one by one.

From the Willoweed cottage, sisters Emma and Hattie watch the tragedy unfold. They have grown up in the village, cared for by their meek father and bullied by their grandmother with her enormous ear trumpet. The wild and mysterious countryside is the only world they have ever known. But as the virus spreads and hysteria grips everyone around them, they realise their lives are about to change forever.

A twisted pandemic parable and a tragicomic gem.

Barbara Comyns (1909–1992) was born in England and raised in the care of governesses who allowed her and her siblings to run wild. She began writing and illustrating her work when she was a girl and in her teens, attended art school. She then married a painter and had two children. To support her family, she dealt in antiques and vintage cars, renovated apartments, and bred poodles. She later lived in Spain and died in 1992, leaving two children, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and eleven books.

Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
Release date: 03-15-23

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Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

Pretty, unworldly Sophia is twenty-one years old and hastily married to a young painter called Charles. An artist’s model with an eccentric collection of pets, she is ill-equipped to cope with the bohemian London of the 1930s, where poverty, babies (however much loved) and her husband conspire to torment her.

Hoping to add some spice to her life, Sophia takes up with Peregrine, a dismal, ageing critic, and comes to regret her marriage - and her affair. But in this case, virtue is more than its own reward, for repentance brings an abrupt end to the cycle of unsold pictures, unpaid bills and unwashed dishes…

Barbara Comyns (1909–1992) was born in England and raised in the care of governesses who allowed her and her siblings to run wild. She began writing and illustrating her work when she was a girl and in her teens, attended art school. She then married a painter and had two children. To support her family, she dealt in antiques and vintage cars, renovated apartments, and bred poodles. She later lived in Spain and died in 1992, leaving two children, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and eleven books.

Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
Release date: 03-15-23

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The Vet’s Daughter

Growing up in Edwardian south London, Alice Rowlands longs for romance and excitement, for a release from a life that is dreary and lonely. Her father, a vet, is harsh and oppressive; his new girlfriend, brash and lascivious.

Alice seeks refuge in fantasy, in her rapturous longing for Nicholas, a handsome young sailor, and in the blossoming of what she perceives as her occult powers.

Harrowing and haunting, a Gothic tale that is a strange cross between Daphne Du Maurier and Stephen King, but will also intrigue readers of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Diane Setterfield.

Barbara Comyns (1909–1992) was born in England and raised in the care of governesses who allowed her and her siblings to run wild. She began writing and illustrating her work when she was a girl and in her teens, attended art school. She then married a painter and had two children. To support her family, she dealt in antiques and vintage cars, renovated apartments, and bred poodles. She later lived in Spain and died in 1992, leaving two children, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and eleven books.

Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
Release date: 03-15-23