Julian cover art

Julian

A Novel

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Julian

By: Gore Vidal
Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner, George Newbern, David de Vries, Jeff Cummings
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About this listen

The remarkable bestseller about the fourth-century Roman emperor who famously tried to halt the spread of Christianity, Julian is widely regarded as one of Gore Vidal’s finest historical novels.

Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign. A marvelously imaginative and insightful novel of classical antiquity, Julian captures the religious and political ferment of a desperate age and restores with blazing wit and vigor the legacy of an impassioned ruler.

©1962, 1964 copyright renewed 1990, 1992 by Gore Vidal. (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Political Ancient History War Ancient Greece
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The author has used an unusual structure piecing together fictional correspondence between friends of Julian as well as fictional memoir to construct the novel. This is an interesting way to approach things and highlights some of the ambiguity around Julian's life and actions, but ultimately ends up feeling feeling cold and analytical. The audiobook is somewhat rescued by the extremely high quality of production, including the readers of Julian and his two biographers.

Great performance but writing style is cold

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This was by far the worst book I have bought on Audible - boring, badly structured - read by high-pitched, nasal, mid Western Americans like a bad radio soap opera.

very bad

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