
A Long Way from Verona
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $17.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Cassandra Wilson
-
By:
-
Jane Gardam
About this listen
A young girl aspiring to be a writer recounts her experiences growing up in England during the Second World War. An English schoolgirl has problems, many of them funny, in her attempts to grow up socially. A reissue. Literature of Delight. Headstrong, independent Jessica, at 13, already knows she will be a writer. This early work from a fine British novelist is one of her wittiest. A treasure for sophisticated readers, who won't be shy about seeking out Gardam's adult novels as well, such as Robinson Crusoe's Daughter.
©1971 Jane Gardam (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Hollow Land
- By: Jane Gardam
- Narrated by: Mike Rogers
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bell and Harry, two children who find enchanting wonder at every turn as they explore the hollow land. Everyday challenges give a daring edge to this rural work and play. There are ancient mysteries to explore and uncover, like the case of the Egg Witch, and everyone is curious about the Household Name, a wildly famous Londoner moving in to the jewel of the territory, Light Trees Farm.
-
-
What a charming audiobook!!
- By Doggy Bird on 08-06-23
By: Jane Gardam
-
Old Filth
- By: Jane Gardam
- Narrated by: Bill Wallace
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an 80-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life.
-
-
Literature at its finest!
- By M. Dyson on 07-29-23
By: Jane Gardam
-
Faith Fox
- By: Jane Gardam
- Narrated by: Piers Gibbon
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Faith Fox has led a life full of heartbreak and abandonment, lacking in simplicity and love - and she's not even one week old. She has suffered the unexpected and inexplicable loss of her mother in childbirth; her father, an overworked doctor grown callous with stress, has neither the ability nor the interest to take on the difficult task of raising his child alone; her grandmother, Thomasina, has decided to abscond to Egypt with a retired general rather than acknowledge and accept the loss of her daughter, whom she loved so distressingly well.
-
-
Another Jane Gardam treat!
- By Carole A. Myers on 06-01-23
By: Jane Gardam
-
Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
-
So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Eye of the Leopard
- A Novel
- By: Henning Mankell
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hans Olofson arrives in Zambia not long after independence, hoping to fulfill the missionary dream of his friend Janice. He is also fleeing the traumas of his motherless childhood: his father's alcoholism, his best friend's terrible accident, Janice's death, his fear of an ordinary and stifled fate. Africa is a terrible shock, yet he stays and makes it his home. But he never fully comes to understand his place as a mzungu, a wealthy white man among native blacks, and the fragile truce between them.
-
-
Wonderful English translation.
- By Dartthecat on 01-01-25
By: Henning Mankell
-
After You’d Gone
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Elle Newlands
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice’s family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended.
-
-
Very well written.
- By Audible Fan on 02-24-21
By: Maggie O'Farrell
-
The Hollow Land
- By: Jane Gardam
- Narrated by: Mike Rogers
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bell and Harry, two children who find enchanting wonder at every turn as they explore the hollow land. Everyday challenges give a daring edge to this rural work and play. There are ancient mysteries to explore and uncover, like the case of the Egg Witch, and everyone is curious about the Household Name, a wildly famous Londoner moving in to the jewel of the territory, Light Trees Farm.
-
-
What a charming audiobook!!
- By Doggy Bird on 08-06-23
By: Jane Gardam
-
Old Filth
- By: Jane Gardam
- Narrated by: Bill Wallace
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an 80-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life.
-
-
Literature at its finest!
- By M. Dyson on 07-29-23
By: Jane Gardam
-
Faith Fox
- By: Jane Gardam
- Narrated by: Piers Gibbon
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Faith Fox has led a life full of heartbreak and abandonment, lacking in simplicity and love - and she's not even one week old. She has suffered the unexpected and inexplicable loss of her mother in childbirth; her father, an overworked doctor grown callous with stress, has neither the ability nor the interest to take on the difficult task of raising his child alone; her grandmother, Thomasina, has decided to abscond to Egypt with a retired general rather than acknowledge and accept the loss of her daughter, whom she loved so distressingly well.
-
-
Another Jane Gardam treat!
- By Carole A. Myers on 06-01-23
By: Jane Gardam
-
Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
-
-
So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
-
The Eye of the Leopard
- A Novel
- By: Henning Mankell
- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hans Olofson arrives in Zambia not long after independence, hoping to fulfill the missionary dream of his friend Janice. He is also fleeing the traumas of his motherless childhood: his father's alcoholism, his best friend's terrible accident, Janice's death, his fear of an ordinary and stifled fate. Africa is a terrible shock, yet he stays and makes it his home. But he never fully comes to understand his place as a mzungu, a wealthy white man among native blacks, and the fragile truce between them.
-
-
Wonderful English translation.
- By Dartthecat on 01-01-25
By: Henning Mankell
-
After You’d Gone
- By: Maggie O'Farrell
- Narrated by: Elle Newlands
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice’s family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended.
-
-
Very well written.
- By Audible Fan on 02-24-21
By: Maggie O'Farrell
-
The Sisters
- By: Dervla McTiernan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this prequel to the international best seller The Ruin, set 10 years prior, bright-eyed Carrie Ryan is at the very start of her career. When she has a hunch about an ongoing murder investigation, she knows it could be her only chance to prove herself and truly break into the “boys' club” of Dublin’s police force.
-
-
Look forward to hearing more from this author
- By C. E. Pitchford on 09-09-19
By: Dervla McTiernan
-
Death at La Fenice
- Commissario Brunetti Mysteries, Book 1
- By: Donna Leon
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During intermission at the famed La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, a notoriously difficult and widely disliked German conductor is poisoned—and suspects abound. Guido Brunetti, a native Venetian, sets out to unravel the mystery behind the high-profile murder. To do so, he calls on his knowledge of Venice, its culture, and its dirty politics. Along the way, he finds the crime may have roots going back decades—and that revenge, corruption, and even Italian cuisine may play a role.
-
-
Hercule Poirot in Venice...!!!
- By Emil Grancagnolo on 10-09-22
By: Donna Leon
-
On Java Road
- A Novel
- By: Lawrence Osborne
- Narrated by: Michael Obiora
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After two decades as a journalist in Hong Kong, ex-pat Englishman Adrian Gyle has very little to show for it. Evenings are whiled away with soup dumplings and tea at Fung Shing, the restaurant downstairs from his home on Java Road, watching the city erupt in violence as pro-democracy demonstrations hit ever closer to home. Watching from the skyrises is Adrian’s old friend Jimmy Tang, the scion of one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families. Just as Gyle prepares to turn his back on Hong Kong, he finds one last intrigue: Rebecca, a student involved in the protests.
-
-
Another winning novel by Laurence Osborne
- By Reed Ramlow on 09-26-22
By: Lawrence Osborne
-
Shrines of Gaiety
- A Novel
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Jason Watkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1926, and in a country still recovering from the Great War, London has become the focus for a delirious new nightlife. In the clubs of Soho, peers of the realm rub shoulders with starlets, foreign dignitaries with gangsters, and girls sell dances for a shilling a time. The notorious queen of this glittering world is Nellie Coker, ruthless but also ambitious to advance her six children, including the enigmatic eldest, Niven, whose character has been forged in the crucible of the Somme. But success breeds enemies, and Nellie’s empire faces threats from without and within.
-
-
Rich characters of all stripes
- By Glorious Lorius on 11-09-22
By: Kate Atkinson
-
These Names Make Clues
- By: E. C.R. Lorac
- Narrated by: David Thorpe
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Chief Inspector Macdonald has been invited to a treasure hunt party at the house of the Graham Coombe, the celebrated publisher of Murder by Mesmerism. The clues of the hunt have been devised by Coombe's thriller-writer friends, disguised on the night under literary pseudonyms. The fun comes to an abrupt end, however, when 'Samuel Pepys' is found murdered in the telephone room in bizarre circumstances.
-
-
Fun story.
- By peter on 03-12-22
By: E. C.R. Lorac
-
Life After Life
- A Novel
- By: Kate Atkinson
- Narrated by: Fenella Woolgar
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war.
-
-
Strange & Fascinating
- By Sara on 11-02-15
By: Kate Atkinson
-
Coming Home
- By: Rosamunde Pilcher
- Narrated by: Helen Johns
- Length: 40 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set against the backdrop of an elegant Cornwall mansion before World War II and a vast continent-spanning canvas during the turbulent war years, this captivating story tells of an extraordinary young woman's coming of age, coming to grips with love and sadness, and in every sense of the term, coming home.... In 1935, Judith Dunbar is left behind at a British boarding school when her mother and baby sister go off to join her father in Singapore.
-
-
Marvelous story line, Excellent narration
- By Amazon Customer on 03-17-18
-
Birnam Wood
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Catton
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 12 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.
-
-
Outstanding thriller w/ exceptional character development
- By Bradley T. Collins on 04-21-23
By: Eleanor Catton
-
Good Behaviour
- A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems
- By: Molly Keane
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Behind the gates of Temple Alice, the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires. This elegant and allusive novel established Molly Keane as the natural successor to Jean Rhys.
-
-
Great all around
- By Kindle Customer on 07-18-24
By: Molly Keane
-
Found in a Bookshop
- By: Stephanie Butland
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Loveday Cardew's beloved Lost for Words bookshop, along with the rest of York, has fallen quiet. At the very time when people most need books to widen their horizons, or escape from their fears, or enhance their lives, the doors are closed. Then the first letter comes. Rosemary and George have been married for fifty years. Now their time is running out. They have decided to set out on their last journey together, without ever leaving the bench at the bottom of their garden in Whitby. All they need is someone who shares their love of books.
-
-
Best book I’ve read in a long time.
- By Maggie L Tawil on 06-04-23
-
The Railway Children
- By: E. Nesbit
- Narrated by: Virginia Leishman
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Father has suddenly and mysteriously disappeared. Now Mother has moved Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis from London to an old English country house. Missing the hustle and bustle of the city, the children are ecstatic to find that their new home is near a railway station. Making friends with both the porter and the station master is great fun. So is waving to a kindly old gentleman who rides through on the 9:15 every morning. When mother gets sick, it is he to whom they turn for help. And later, when a fortunate twist of fate returns their father to them, they are surprised to find the old gentleman involved once again.
-
-
Excellent narration
- By Greenleaf on 11-24-17
By: E. Nesbit
-
Walk the Blue Fields
- Stories
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly, Aoife McMahon, Aidan Quinn
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Claire Keegan continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland. A writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll's old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder whose ulterior motives emerge as the night progresses. A priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage—and battles his memories of a love affair that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life. And a man seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle as he mourns both his empty life and his lost love.
-
-
Just Superb.
- By Deborah on 12-09-22
By: Claire Keegan
What listeners say about A Long Way from Verona
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kitty
- 07-28-17
Hilarious and delightful
What made the experience of listening to A Long Way from Verona the most enjoyable?
A wonderful reading of a book that should be much better known than it is. (Check out the Backlisted podcast for an excellent discussion of the book, if you're interested.)
What did you like best about this story?
An incredibly honest and extremely funny lead character, whose journey towards adulthood is like no other. Loved her and loved the reading.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- PatSChi
- 04-12-16
Can't Understand Strong British Accent!
Would you try another book from Jane Gardam and/or Cassandra Wilson?
After being unable to understand this Audible version, I purchased a hard copy of this book and loved it. Yes, I would buy another book if the Audible version was easier to understand.
Would you be willing to try another one of Cassandra Wilson’s performances?
No.
Any additional comments?
I use Audible so that someone can read a book to me while I'm driving or otherwise unable to read a hard copy book. I do NOT want to listen to someone's version of a drama with extreme accents. Please, just a good reader, able to use appropriate voice inflection but no screeching adaption of a book!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful