The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna Clarke, Davina Porter, and Simon Prebble

Buy The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories here. To find out more information or to view another item in this category, click next Science Fiction. To go back to where you were looking, use the "you are here" links below. Thank you for shopping at audiobookoncd.com!

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories from Science Fiction

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
Available from Amazon
Price: $29.95
Updated on 12-28-2008.

Features

Audio CD

Publisher: Macmillan Audio; Unabridged edition (October 17, 2006)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1427200785

ISBN-13: 978-1427200785

Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches

Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces ()

From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Clarke's bestselling Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell should be pleased with this book, as the stories collected here are very much cut from the same cloth. The stories (seven previously published and one original tale, "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner") deal with fairies and the history of English magic, and are told in the same Victorian style that made JS&MN so distinct. Prebble (who also narrated JS&MN) returns and once again triumphantly brings Clarke's richly imagined world to life. Sharing narrative duties this time around is Porter, who is equally skilled at playing prim and high-born ladies as she is using more folksy tones in "On Lickerish Hill." The footnotes that bogged down the audio edition of JS&MN are mostly absent, and the narrators' very different styles work well to give each story its own distinct feel. A lyrical and thoroughly enjoyable collection from a burgeoning master of fantasy literature.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Spare a thought for the poor publisher. After taking a chance with a left-field entry in Susanna Clarke's door-stopping debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, they found themselves with a huge hit on their hands. The novel was ecstatically reviewed, garnered some important genre awards and sold in several languages. With all that goodwill and high profile, the only thing the publisher has to worry about is the follow-up, and while they wait for that next book, there's the scramble to publish, well, pretty much anything by the author to capitalize on what has gone before. And that's the problem with The Ladies of Grace Adieu. Strange & Norrell was located squarely in the fantasy genre but was celebrated for its literary touch and its filigree attention to detail. A gigantic pastiche of 18th-century prose and sensibility, it was like a beautiful, long, scholarly essay on the supernatural and the world of faerie. Shorn of that density, however, the stories in The Ladies of Grace Adieu struggle to weave the same magic. Containing eight short stories previously published between 1996 and 2004, the collection effectively amounts to a pooling of practice pieces, exercises for Strange & Norrell. Granted, they are very clever exercises, mostly offered again as careful restorations of late 18th- and early 19th-century compositions. But without the scope and the escapist hermetical seal of Strange & Norrell, the stories become suddenly exposed as light-as-a-feather whimsies.They're familiar fairy tales or dovetailed traditional yarns touched up for the purposes of elegant retelling. There is a take on Rumpelstiltskin in "On Lickerish Hill" and a reprise of the time dilations of fairyland in "Mrs Mabb." Needlework pictures come to life in another slightly derivative tale called "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse." Two more stories venture further back in the historical timeline, with Tudor and vaguely medieval settings. And although the title story anticipates the novel and indeed introduces the characters of Strange and Norrell, as a whole the collection tends to line up the usual suspects and the usual furniture, too, of fairyland. The prose, though, is consistently flawless and beautiful. Reading Clarke is like inspecting some wonderful antiquated craft, such as marquetry or fine hand embroidery. It's just that there are yards and yards and yards of the stuff, and at the back of your admiration for it all is a question about how, really, anyone can find the time. Because there is more at stake here, after all. Fairy tales, and the exploration of fairy tales, have been the subject of some extraordinary and enlightening research in the past few decades. On a critical level, one thinks of Marina Warner's astonishing excavations, and in the fictional arena lies the superb anthologizing work of editors and writers such as Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, who have done so much to remodel the fairy tale and reactivate its original dark forms. But the motive in The Ladies of Grace Adieu (and perhaps in Strange & Norrell, too) seems to be to push the djinn back in the bottle and cork it with period prose. These stories are safe, quirky and unthreatening, and the only time you are likely to stumble across the word "sex" in them is with reference to gender. You may find a woman's elegant white neck admired, but you'll be hard pressed to follow the gaze. The characters are emotionally disengaged. There is a kind of darkness, but there is no shadow. Clarke's writing displays a sense of cold virtuosity and a feeling of magic misdirected, of great cleverness without heft. Whether it takes 10 months or 10 years to produce her next full-length work, Susanna Clarke is a better writer than this showcase would have you believe. Devotees and completist fans of Strange and Norrell will want to get their hands on this book, but the rest will probably want to wait. Reviewed by Graham Joyce
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (Hardcover) For those who have read _Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_: This book is essentially a collection of short stories of the same kind as the various snippets included as footnotes in _Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_, but of greater length -- not so much a sequel as a collection of spin-off tales. It even includes at least one story referred to in that book but never detailed therein (the tale of John Uskglass and the Cumbrian charcoal burner). Only one of the stories features either Strange or Norell as characters, but all of them (with the possible exception of "The Duke of Wellington Misplaces his Horse," which is set in or perhaps overlaps with, the setting of Neil Gaiman's _Stardust_) are set in and flesh out the same world. All share the same dryly witty, intelligent, intellectually charming writing style that made the prior novel so worthwhile. In some ways, this collection shows more technical expertise than _Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_, because the stories include a number of different viewpoints, use different stylistic devices, and achieve a different range of effects than found in the novel. The author has a wider range to play with here, outside the limits of a single novel's plotline, and she takes excellent advantage of that. For those who have not: If you like Jane Austen, have a strong taste for 18th or 19th century fiction or fantasy stories, like Neil Gaiman's _Stardust_ or Lord Dunsany's works, or find the thought of an mix of those two sources appealing, this book will probably appeal to you very strongly and I recommend it highly. It may be the first original short-story collection in a very long time to draw upon the same tradition as the old classics like Howard Pyle's _Wonder Clock_ or the old Andrew Lang _[color] Fairy Books_, with the exception and improvement that this story collection has its own sensibility, style, and manner -- this is not a random medley of folk tales, but a deliberate product of a skilled writer working to create a specific fantasy milieu. It would be relatively accurate to describe the book as a collection, not of "fairy tales," but of recorded, historical stories about fairies from a world whose history ran (mostly) parallel to our own, but with slightly more magic. Most of the stories are written with a dry, highly mannered wit, very reminiscent of Jane Austen's writing style -- a deliberate conciet, I'm sure, and very well executed (One of the stories in the collection is an exception, a version of a classic fairy tale written in period Suffolk dialect; it may be the best-executed of the lot).This is "historical fiction" of a very specific kind. Only two stories feature historical characters ("The Duke of Wellington Misplaces his Horse" and "Antickes and Frets," which concerns Mary Queen of Scots), but the setting, tone, and style are all set in the 18th or 19th centuries and executed as if the stories were written by period authors. This is not the sort of "historical fiction" where someone writes a modern thriller and throws a bunch of historical names into the pot as minor characters -- it is historical fiction written (mostly) as if written during the time period wherein the stories were set -- one of them even is even an epistolary story, taking the form of a series of period journal entries and letters. I don't mean to imply that these stories are derivative, or exact replicas of old fairy tales, or that the style merely mimics Austen's, etc. All of those sources are drawn upon, but a remarkably modern synthesis is achieved -- this is very clearly a modern work, and there are definitely places where sex, violence, and all the other things modern audiences desire show through the mannered veneer of style and tone. But the mannered, wit-charged tone, the period conceits, etc., all are expertly utilized; the reader is left with a definite impression that all of these stories are part of an extant, coherent, and compelling world. Everything in each story fits together, and all of the stories fit together into a whole - even if none of the plotlines intersect, they all hang together in the same general web. I would not recommend this book to everyone. Some people just aren't going to go for this sort of thing. But if you like any of the stylistic sources on which the author draws, or if you appreciate an author with a clever, unique style, or if you just like masterful writing, then you will almost certainly regret not purchasing a copy of this book. It is hard to imagine this sort of fantasy/historical fiction hybrid being executed more masterfully by anyone. If you read this book and like it, you'll almost certainly find yourself purchasing the novel as well. A final word on the illustrations: Charles Vess's line-drawing illustrations provide an excellent accompaniment to the text, both in tone and in richness of detail. They achieve much the same sort of balance that the text does,such that the viewer simultaneously realizes they are not period illustrations but is, at the same time, given the impression that could have been.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
List Price: $29.95
Available from Amazon
Price: $29.95
Updated on 12-28-2008.