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Wake Up And Dream

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Wake Up And Dream

By: Ian R MacLeod
Narrated by: Jeff Harding
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About this listen

Hollywood, 1940. It’s the Golden Age of the Feelies. All one-time actor and unlicensed matrimonial private eye Clark Gable has to do is impersonate a wealthy scriptwriter for a few hours, and sign the contract for the biopic of the inventor of a device which has changed entertainment forever. What could go wrong? Already, he’s seeing ghosts — but that’s nothing unusual. Europe is devastated by war and America is sleep-walking into Fascism — but what’s that got to do with him? By turns wry and romantic, but always gripping, multi-award winning writer Ian R MacLeod’s latest novel is a dazzling collision of science, fantasy and history. Like the feelies themselves, Wake Up and Dream is film noir with Technicolor wraiths.

©2011 Ian R MacLeod (P)2011 Audible Ltd Fantasy Fiction Science Fiction

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Critic reviews

"MacLeod expertly hits all the hard-boiled beats, delivering the creepy, fascinating, strange, and wholly enjoyable story with a noir melancholy, a keen eye for detail, and plenty of snappy dialogue." (Publisher's Weekly)
"Set in an antisemitic US drifting towards collusion with Nazi Germany, Wake Up and Dream slowly picks at the artifice of Hollywood to reveal its morally rotten core. MacLeod won the Arthur C Clarke award in 2009, and on the strength of this novel should do so again." (The Guardian)
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Set in an interesting alternative reality, this book had me fascinated with how many of the people and details were "real" and what was pure fiction - and I ended up doing some research on some of the characters. The story is a good one and fairly gripping all the way through, but the ending is a little disappointing.

I found the the American accent of the narrator quite annoying to start with, but as the book progresses I realised that it actually suited the setting and the characters quite well. Worth a listen.

Good, but not quite what it could have been

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... narrated perfectly by Jeff Harding.

Ian R MacLeod has been for some time my favourite alternative reality writer, but in "Wake up and dream" he has perfected the art.

Clark Gable is a failed Hollywood actor, who plies his trade as a private detective in Venice, Los Angeles. He's hired by the wife of a seemingly incapacitated writer to impersonate her husband. His fee is massively beyond his normal charge out rate, but despite his misgivings he accepts the gig. So begins a tale of murder and intrigue in a world markedly different from our own.

A special word for Jeff Harding, who brings the brilliant writing to life with consummate portrayals of a host of characters including tourist boat captain, Humphrey Bogart and the main protagonist, Gable.

If you haven't experienced the world's of McLeod, this is the perfect start. You won't regret it.

The perfect alternate reality novel...

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