Sunday, January 1, 2012

The Audio Version

The beardy Mr. D. 
This weekend I've been listening to the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. Normally I can't read anything I've written after it's completed but with the audio, somehow, it's different. Gerard Doyle is the narrator of Cold Cold and he's really done an amazing job differentiating the characters and coming up with voices. (His Gerry Adams impression roughly in the middle of the book is to die for.) I am not the only one to have noticed this. In the reviews of Cold Cold on Audible I've gotten a few three stars and four stars but so far Doyle has a perfect five star record for his narration. Doyle not only reads the books beautifully but he does a tremendous amount of research. I skyped with Doyle several times as a consult on Cold Cold and last time he even went as far as calling up a Professor of philology at Queens University Belfast to get the right pronunciation of words in Shelta, the language of the Tinkers. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks when I'm riding my bike around town or going to the dreaded gym (currently I'm listening to a Y/A steampunk novel called Leviathan which is narrated by Alan Cumming) but if you haven't yet got hooked on Audible I can thoroughly recommend audio listening as a benign vice. 
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You can get Cold Cold Ground on Audible, here and if you do like it I'd love it if you left me a rating or even better a review. Cheers.