Try free for 30 days
-
Less Than Angels
- Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $25.82
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Jane and Prudence
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Maggie Mash
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The setting of this very funny novel, one of Barbara Pym's earliest, is an English village where Jane's husband is the newly appointed vicar, and where Prudence will pay Jane a visit and find herself courted by a fatuous young widower.
-
-
Terrible narration spoiled the book
- By Anna M on 05-03-2018
-
A Glass of Blessings
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking, and fairly young - but very bored. Her husband Rodney, a handsome army major, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less. Her interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the more serious-minded company of three unmarried priests and Piers Longridge, a man of a different character altogether.
-
-
Boring!
- By Anonymous User on 30-04-2023
-
Some Tame Gazelle
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different...'Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that elderly Italian Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year.
-
-
An early novel by the highly gifted Barbara Pym
- By Edmund Doogue on 24-06-2020
-
Excellent Women
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble, Gerry Halligan
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks.
-
-
Loved it, funny and gentle
- By KitBallou on 07-06-2023
-
No Fond Return of Love
- By: Barbara Pym, Paul Binding - introduction
- Narrated by: Jane McDowell
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dulcie Mainwaring is always helping others, but never looks out for herself—especially in the realm of love. Her friend Viola is besotted by the alluring Dr Aylwin Forbes, so surely it isn't prying if Dulcie helps things along? Aylwin, however, is smitten with Dulcie's pretty young niece. And perhaps Dulcie herself, however ridiculous it might be, is falling, just a little, for Aylwin. Once life's little humiliations are played out, maybe love will be returned, and fondly, after all.
-
Civil to Strangers
- By: Barbara Pym, Hazel Holt - introduction
- Narrated by: Deryn Edwards
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Barbara Pym died in 1980, she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, Civil to Strangers, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, 'Finding a Voice', Pym's only written comment on her writing career.
-
Jane and Prudence
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Maggie Mash
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The setting of this very funny novel, one of Barbara Pym's earliest, is an English village where Jane's husband is the newly appointed vicar, and where Prudence will pay Jane a visit and find herself courted by a fatuous young widower.
-
-
Terrible narration spoiled the book
- By Anna M on 05-03-2018
-
A Glass of Blessings
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good looking, and fairly young - but very bored. Her husband Rodney, a handsome army major, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less. Her interest wanders to the nearby Anglo-Catholic church, where at last she can neglect her comfortable household in the more serious-minded company of three unmarried priests and Piers Longridge, a man of a different character altogether.
-
-
Boring!
- By Anonymous User on 30-04-2023
-
Some Tame Gazelle
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It was odd that Harriet should always have been so fond of curates. They were so immature and always made the same kind of conversation. Now the Archdeacon was altogether different...'Together yet alone, the Misses Bede occupy the central crossroads of parish life. Harriet, plump, elegant and jolly, likes nothing better than to make a fuss of new curates, secure in the knowledge that elderly Italian Count Ricardo Bianco will propose to her yet again this year.
-
-
An early novel by the highly gifted Barbara Pym
- By Edmund Doogue on 24-06-2020
-
Excellent Women
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble, Gerry Halligan
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mildred Lathbury is one of those 'excellent women' who is often taken for granted. She is a godsend, 'capable of dealing with most of the stock situations of life - birth, marriage, death, the successful jumble sales, the garden fete spoilt by bad weather'. As such, she often gets herself embroiled in other people's lives - especially those of her glamorous new neighbours, the Napiers, whose marriage seems to be on the rocks.
-
-
Loved it, funny and gentle
- By KitBallou on 07-06-2023
-
No Fond Return of Love
- By: Barbara Pym, Paul Binding - introduction
- Narrated by: Jane McDowell
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Dulcie Mainwaring is always helping others, but never looks out for herself—especially in the realm of love. Her friend Viola is besotted by the alluring Dr Aylwin Forbes, so surely it isn't prying if Dulcie helps things along? Aylwin, however, is smitten with Dulcie's pretty young niece. And perhaps Dulcie herself, however ridiculous it might be, is falling, just a little, for Aylwin. Once life's little humiliations are played out, maybe love will be returned, and fondly, after all.
-
Civil to Strangers
- By: Barbara Pym, Hazel Holt - introduction
- Narrated by: Deryn Edwards
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Barbara Pym died in 1980, she left a considerable amount of unpublished material. This volume contains an early novel, Civil to Strangers, three novellas and an autobiographical essay, 'Finding a Voice', Pym's only written comment on her writing career.
-
An Academic Question
- By: Barbara Pym, Kate Saunders - introduction
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
Crampton Hodnet
- By: Barbara Pym, Louis de Bernieres - introduction
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Formidable Miss Doggett fills her life by giving tea parties for young academics and acting as watchdog for the morals of North Oxford. Anthea, her great-niece, is in love with a dashing undergraduate with political ambitions. Of this, Miss Doggett thoroughly approves. However, Anthea's father, an Oxford don, is carrying on in the most unseemly fashion with a student—they have been spotted together at the British museum! But the only liaison Miss Doggett isn't aware of is taking place under her very own roof.
-
North Woods
- By: Daniel Mason
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Billie Fulford-Brown, George Newbern, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When a pair of young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and inhuman characters alike. In his transcendent fourth novel, Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason delivers a magisterial and highly inventive tale brimming with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we're connected to our environment, to history and to each other.
-
-
An awesome journey through time!
- By Andrea on 14-12-2023
-
Barbara Pym: A BBC Radio Drama Collection
- Some Tame Gazelle, No Fond Return of Love, Crampton Hodnet & More
- By: Barbara Pym
- Narrated by: Miriam Margolyes, Hannah Gordon, Samantha Bond, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Never Tired of BP in my life
- By Julie Bradby on 04-12-2022
-
The Diary of a Provincial Lady
- By: E. M. Delafield
- Narrated by: Georgina Sutton
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
'Lady B. stays to tea. (Mem.: Bread-and-butter too thick. Speak to Ethel.) We talk some more about bulbs, the Dutch School of Painting, our Vicar's wife, sciatica, and All Quiet on the Western Front. (Query: is it possible to cultivate the art of conversation when living in the country all the year round?)' If the question suggests a qualified answer, there is no doubt that the art of diary writing is alive and well and very, very funny in Devonshire in the 1920s. At least in the hands of E. M. Delafield.
-
-
Hilariously perfect in every way
- By Anonymous User on 07-09-2019
-
The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym
- By: Paula Byrne
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 17 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
English novelist Barbara Pym’s career was defined, in many senses, by rejection. Her first novel Some Tame Gazelle was turned down by every publisher she sent it out in 1935, finally published only 15 years later. Though she picked up a publisher from there and received modest praise, the publishing industry grew restless and her sales spiralled downwards. By her seventh novel, she had been dropped. This brilliant biography, brimming with Pym’s private diaries and intimate letters, offers a first full insight into Barbara Pym’s life and how it informed her writing.
-
The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England
- A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
- By: Ian Mortimer
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Imagine you could travel back to the 14th century. What would you see? What would you smell? More to the point, where are you going to stay? And what are you going to eat? Ian Mortimer shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. He sets out to explain what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking you to the Middle Ages. The result is the most astonishing social history book you are ever likely to read: evolutionary in its concept, informative and entertaining in its detail.
-
-
A fascinating glimpse into human nature
- By Lawrence on 15-01-2015
-
The Vaster Wilds
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Part of a loose trilogy based on the end of empire, The Vaster Wilds is the story of a young girl who is servant to a minister and his young mistress, and in charge of their young daughter Bess. On an epic voyage across the Atlantic, ship-wrecked, far from home and fighting for survival, the protagonist of Lauren Groff's extraordinary new novel must endure but also find meaning in the journey.
-
-
Stunning, devastating
- By Amazon Customer on 11-02-2024
-
P.G. Wodehouse Volume 1
- The Jeeves Collection
- By: P.G. Wodehouse
- Narrated by: Stephen Fry
- Length: 40 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“I have the honour to offer up to you, thanks to the good people of Audible, a selection of some of my very favourite Wodehouse. If these stories are new to you I hope it will be the beginning of a lifelong pleasure, if some or all are familiar I hope you will welcome them like old friends.” (Stephen Fry). Audible Studios presents this brand new performance by Stephen Fry of some of his favourite Jeeves stories from P.G. Wodehouse, with an exclusive introduction.
-
-
Perfect narration
- By Louise on 18-01-2021
-
Cold Comfort Farm
- Penguin Classics
- By: Stella Gibbons
- Narrated by: Pearl Mackie
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at 19, she decides her only choice is to descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos, preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine; and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last 20 years. But Flora loves nothing better than to organise other people.
-
The House of Doors
- By: Tan Twan Eng
- Narrated by: David Oakes, Louise-Mai Newberry
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1921 and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife Lesley a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert's, comes to stay. Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day. But he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write. The more Lesley's friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she see him as he is—a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.
-
-
The poetry of the writing
- By Anonymous User on 05-02-2024
-
The Pursuit of Love
- By: Nancy Mitford
- Narrated by: Bessie Carter
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written, Nancy Mitford's classic is now major a BBC and Prime Video series directed by Emily Mortimer and starring Lily James, Andrew Scott and Dominic West. Oh, the tedium of waiting to grow up! Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the lookout for the perfect lover. But finding Mr Right is much harder than any of the sisters had thought.
-
-
Delightful
- By Anonymous User on 29-01-2023
Publisher's Summary
Less Than Angels follows the loves, works and hopes of a group of young anthropologists.
Catherine Oliphant is a writer and lives with handsome anthropologist Tom Mallow. Their relationship runs into trouble when he begins a romance with student Deirdre Swann, so Catherine turns her attention to the reclusive anthropologist Alaric Lydgate, who has a fondness for wearing African masks.
Added to this love triangle are the activities of Deirdre's fellow students and their attempts to win the competition for a research grant. The course of true love - or academia - never did run smooth.
Critic Reviews
More from the same
What listeners say about Less Than Angels
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Edmund Doogue
- 16-10-2018
A more complex Miss Pym
This is Barbara Pym's book about anthropologists. Less of church, more of academia. And Africa in the background. It's very different from Pym's classics, A Glass of Blessings and Excellent Women. Lots more characters in this one, some love stories and well handled. It's a great book to listen to. Bravo to Patience Tomlinson for her skilful narration. And bravo Audible for commissioning it. Please bring us more Barbara Pym. Her novels sparkle and are a joy to listen to.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful