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An Academic Question
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
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Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.
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- Narrated by: Georgina Sutton
- Length: 26 hrs and 42 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Introduced by Kate Saunders.
In a provincial university town, Caro Grimstone, a dissatisfied faculty wife, becomes the unwilling accomplice to her husband Alan's ambitions. When she volunteers to read to a blind esteemed anthropologist in a nursing home, Alan seizes the opportunity to steal his papers—research that could both advance his reputation while refuting the findings of a respected colleague. A delightful comedy of manners with a touch of mystery, An Academic Question is prime Barbara Pym territory.
Critic Reviews
"She is the rarest of treasures; she reminds us of the heartbreaking silliness of everyday life." (Anne Tyler)
"Beneath the gentle surfaces of her novels is a slow-building comedy, salt wit in a saline drip." (New York Times)