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The Monk

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The Monk

By: Matthew Lewis
Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton, Georgina Sutton
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About this listen

A masterpiece of gothic fiction, The Monk is a cautionary tale of madness, horror, lust, and despair. Father Ambrosio, the most pious and venerated monk in all of Madrid, is held as a paragon of virtue. But after 30 years of study and prayer, evil thoughts begin to permeate his mind.

As two plots cleverly converge, torture, murder, incest, rape, poison, and magic prevail, sustained by an elegance in the writing of the 19-year-old Matthew Lewis.

The book was banned upon its initial publication in 1796, but later caught the attention of Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with Coleridge naming it "the offspring of no common genius".

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.

Public Domain (P)2017 Naxos AudioBooks Classics Genre Fiction Horror Literary Fiction Fiction Scary
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I was recommended this book from a recently made acquaintance who is very book oriented and loves gothic literature and thought I would enjoy this too. Suffice to say they weren't wrong. The floral language that exaggerates each scene and narrative is well done and the story is fully engaging throughout.

oddly enough I did find the B plot to be my favourite of the two, however; which is not to fault the A plot, but it certainly had a lot more stakes to it, in my opinion.

when I originally saw that this was a 14hr long Title and that each of the chapters were around an hour a piece, I didn't find that particularly surprising until the Narrator's speed and cadence explained why it was that long. they speak wonderfully and eloquently, but also very slowly. I chose to listen to this at 1.25x speed relatively early and it made it sound far more natural and conversational that originally recorded and also saved nearly 5hrs off the original run Time.

if you do like long winding narratives with beautiful language and enjoy the idea of adding some occasional extra actors for singing and the like into your audio books, along with the odd classical poem here and there, I would highly recommend this; just do it at 1.25x to not let it drag on you too much

wonderful presentation, but 1.25x recommended

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Audible exists for this. This is an old book and a long book and although the story is excellent and utterly engrossing, I think if I had only the print version then the experience would have been very different.

The narrator acts the story and does so superbly. There are moments when a character sings a song and an actual song, with music, plays.

As I said, utterly engrossing.

amazing narration

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