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The Buccaneers

A Novel

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The Buccaneers

By: Edith Wharton, Marion Mainwaring
Narrated by: Carol Monda
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About this listen

Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—now an original series on AppleTV+!

“Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review

Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful.

After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.

©1993 Marion Mainwaring (P)2022 Penguin Audio Classics Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction

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Critic reviews

"Brave, lively, engaging . . . a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life."—The New York Times Book Review

"The Buccaneers brilliantly showcases Wharton near the top of her form."—Chicago Tribune

"Mainwaring has added gloss to the story's original elegance and wit, and the novel emerges like a master's painting from the hands of a highly skilled restorer."—Leon Edel, author of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning Henry James: A Life

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My enjoyment of this brilliant tale was marred by the narrator's harsh, grating voice and by her grotesque mispronunciations, especially of words in languages other than English. Her attempts at rendering upper-class English speech were lamentable.

wharton at her best let down by narrator

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I don’t usually like modern books but this being from the late 19th Century is quite an exceptional.

This book was full of surprise information about the period I thoroughly enjoyed it.

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First Wharton story I've listened to and I'd make time for it daily. A great performance for an incredibly entertaining classic

An incredibly entertaining story

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Disliked narrator which marred my enjoyment of the book. It's a heavy smoker's voice and her switch to 'English' accents was shrill and quite poor. I'd wince whenever she was doing individual character's voices. Will avoid any future recordings which use her, I'm afraid.

Poor narrator

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