The Black Moth cover art

The Black Moth

Gossip, scandal and an unforgettable Regency romance

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The Black Moth

By: Georgette Heyer
Narrated by: Stewart Clarke
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Georgette Heyer's Remarkable First Novel

Diana Beauleigh is caught between two men.

Seven long years ago, Jack Carstares, the Earl of Wyncham, sacrificed his honour for his brother and has been in exile ever since.

Returning to England, Jack pretends to be a gentleman named Sir Anthony Ferndale but makes his living in a most ungentlemanly fashion, as a highwayman and a gambler.

When Jack encounters his nemesis, the Duke of Andover, in the midst of kidnapping Diana Beauleigh, the two old enemies come to blows.

Can Jack save the beautiful Diana from rakes, kidnap and ruin?

©1921 Georgette Heyer (P)2021 Penguin Audio Classics Historical Historical Fiction Romance

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All stars
Most relevant
Nothing to dislike a wonderful first novel with humour and finesse all her books are so much fun

Amazing

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Really enjoyed this book. I thought the narrator did very well. He acted all the parts rather than just read them.

Enjoyable Version

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Terrible narration with many mispronunciations, even the surname of the main character was incorrectly pronounced.

Oh dear!

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The story is lovely. Sadly the narrator got many pronunciations wrong, especially the lead characters name! It should have been pronounced Car-stairs, instead he pronounced it Car-star-ez which becomes very grating! Also Cholmondley should have been pronounced Chumley, not the way it is written. I felt he also made Richard sound very breathy and silly. I could have enjoyed it very much if not for those things.

Bad pronunciation

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Brilliant narration. Did lose my place with plot a few times as there are a lot of characters and sub plots but was made easier by narrator's excellent characterisations making it easier to discern them.

Great narration

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loved it and sorry to finish. narration is pitched just right and easy to listen to. thankyou

brilliant book

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I cannot understand how a producer, director and editor at Penguin allowed the reader to miss-pronounce the hero’s name throughout the book! And other proper names - Grosvenor - plus several weird attempts at words including elbow, which became “below”, Duke and New were Americanised into Dook and noo. It really ruined a good story. His reading style was good; it flowed fairly well and was exciting to listen to, but the bizarre pronunciation spoiled it completely. There exists a much older - excellent - recording of The Black Moth which is available in the rest of the world but not licensed for the UK. Why? I do wish Audible would keep all recordings on the website, especially the older ones where the actors usually get the words right and even know what some of the more obscure words actually mean! One can tell immediately if the reader doesn’t understand what a phrase or sentence means. The better readers are also much less stilted in their delivery. Some readers seem to need to pause every six or seven words, whether it fits the sentence or not, thus losing flow and losing the meaning of the sentence. I have some six hundred audiobooks in my Audible library (!) so I have listened to some brilliant readers and a few so dire I cannot listen to more than two minutes of the sample. The best ones are works of art that take you away into another world. This, sadly, was not one of those.

Ruined by the narrator

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I have read this book at least 20 times and own a couple of audio versions. Totally annoying is the way the narrator pronounces the name of the leading character! He manages to turn an ordinary English name into a bizarre Italian one! If you don’t know the book then enjoy but if you do know the book you have been warned.

Pronunciation

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The story was good and the reader was excellent especially as so many people were involved

The Black Moth

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I looked forward in anticipation to a new audio version of this novel - a novel I know well. An earlier version was very good apart from an intensely irritating voice given to one character and I was hoping that the new recording would be an improvement. Alas, the same character is presented in an equally irritating way in this new version and, in addition, some other characters grate when occasionally they speak with an elongated vowel sound.
This is very picky of me, there is much to enjoy in this version and the story races along with many of the usual ingredients of a Heyer novel. Discovering her novels as a young teenager back in the 1960s was a delight; listening to them again (and again!) as I approach my dotage is equally delightful.

Great story but the narration is flawed in places . . .

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