About Simon

Simon is an actor who found his way into audiobook narrating as a side-gig and seems to have made a success of it. With some training as an actor as a child (just a couple of hours a week, but it stuck) and 15 years working inside the BBC (ending up as one of the presenters/newsreaders on BBC Radio 4 in London) he found the ideal combination for an audiobook narrator. Found his way to California a few years ago and never left.
Author Archive | Simon

USA Today March 14th, 2013

This is a review by Deidre Donahue in USA Today for the audiobook of Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel : USA Today Audiobook review 

I shall also quote here from the description for this book on the Whole Story Audiobooks purchase page:

Hilary Mantel describes the audio version of Bring Up The Bodies, narrated by Simon Vance:

‘Bring Up The Bodies is a text which sets out to multiply ambiguities… This version deploys a large cast of characters with skill and clarity. Simon Vance is expert in differentiating the men and women of the Tudor court and capturing their personalities. His reading is both tender and energetic. As if by telepathy, he has preserved the rhythm of the text as I heard it when I wrote it. No author could hope for a more faithful and imaginative audio version.’

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The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock_HolmesSir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales are rightly ranked among the seminal works of mystery and detective fiction.  Included are all four full-length Holmes novels and more than forty short masterpieces—from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes and more. At the center of each stands the iconic figure of Holmes—brilliant, eccentric, and capable of amazing feats of deductive reasoning. By his side is Dr. John Watson, his steadfast assistant and our trusty narrator.

About the Author

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best remembered for the creation of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most famous fictional detective, though in his lifetime Doyle also penned essays, poems, short stories, science fiction, nonfiction, historical novels, political treatises, and lectures on Spiritualism.

It was in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet that Sherlock Holmes and his trusty companion, Dr. John Watson, first appeared. Doyle eventually became weary of the stories, hugely popular with both British and American readers, and killed off Holmes in the 1893 short story “The Final Problem”—only to resurrect the character years later in The Hound of the Baskervilles. On July 7, 1930, Doyle died in England of heart failure. His stories of the very logical Sherlock Holmes, which so precisely reflect the latter part of nineteenth-century Victorian England, still capture the imaginations of readers today.

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Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Eleanor Dymott

Every_Contact“This is more than a murder mystery. It’s an examination of the subjectivity of accounts of truth. It’s a desperately moving love story about a lonely man who finds salvation in another only to have the idyll destroyed. Finally, it’s a tale of revenge, served cold and deadly.” —Independent

Elanor Dymott’s gorgeous debut tells the story of Alex, a solitary lawyer who has finally found love in the form of his beautiful wife, Rachel. When Rachel is brutally murdered one midsummer night on the grounds of their alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford, Alex’s life as he knows it vanishes.

He returns to Oxford that winter and, through the shroud of his shock and grief, tries to piece together the mystery surrounding his wife’s death. Playing host to Alex’s winter visit is Harry, Rachel’s former tutor and trusted mentor, who turns out to have been involved in almost every significant development of their relationship. Alex also turns to Evie, Rachel’s self-centered and difficult godmother, whose jealousy of her charge has waxed and waned over the years. And then there are her university friends Anthony and Cissy, who shared with Rachel her taste for literature and for the illicit.

As he delves further into the mystery surrounding her death, Alex discovers in Rachel’s wake a tangled web of sex and jealousy, of would-be lovers and spiteful friends, of the poetry of Robert Browning, and of blackmail. Brilliantly written and suffused with eroticism, mystery, and a hint of menace, Every Contact Leaves a Trace introduces a stunning new voice in contemporary fiction.

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River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay

River_of_StarsIn his critically acclaimed novel Under Heaven, Guy Gavriel Kay told a vivid and powerful story inspired by China’s Tang Dynasty. Now, the international bestselling and multiple award-winning author revisits that invented setting four centuries later with an epic of prideful emperors, battling courtiers, bandits and soldiers, nomadic invasions, and a woman battling in her own way, to find a new place for women in the world – a world inspired this time by the glittering, decadent Song Dynasty.

 

Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate of Kitai. That moment on a lonely road changed his life—in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later—and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles towards the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north.

 

Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor—and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has.

 

In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading to events no one could have foretold, under the river of stars.

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Black Feathers by Joseph D’Lacey

Black_FeathersBlack Feathers is a modern fantasy set in two epochs: the Black Dawn, a time of environmental apocalypse, and generations into the future in its aftermath, the Bright Day.

In each era, a child undertakes a perilous journey to find a dark messiah known as The Crowman. In their hands lies the fate of the planet as they attempt to discover whether The Crowman is our saviour… or the final incarnation of evil.

 

“A bold beginning to a new duology from the brilliant D’Lacey – where two children embark on a search for meaning that is riddled with ambiguity about the nature of the saviour they seek and which, ultimately, provides a siren call to live in harmony with the land.”
- Alison Littlewood, author of A Cold Season

I highly recommend this to any fans of horror, post-apocalyptic type books. Loved it, loved it – I want the next one already.
-Thoughts of a Scot

“…full of powerful and beautiful passages that while written for this fictional Earth, are also very strongly advocating for us as a people to take better care of the Earth we live on.”
-Wilder’s Book Review

“Spectacular is the word I’d use to describe the novel. Nothing else can capture the reading experience.” 
-The Founding Fields

About the Author: D’Lacey is the award-winning author best known for his shocking eco-horror novel Meat, which won him the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer in 2009 and prompted no less a literary luminary than Stephen King to declare “Joseph D’Lacey rocks!” The author lives in Great Britain.

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The Stranger by Camilla Läckberg

The_StrangerIn the new thriller by Camilla Läckberg, a string of suspicious deaths points to a potential serial killer who has turned his eye toward Fjallbacka and her dark forests, where two children vanished decades before.

A local woman is killed in a tragic car crash, but it isn’t a clear-cut drunk driving case. The victim’s blood contains high alcohol levels, but she rarely drank a drop. Meanwhile, a reality TV show begins shooting in the town, and as cameras shadow the stars’ every move, tempers start to flare. When a drunken party ends with an unpopular contestant’s murder, all eyes turn to the cast and crew could there be a murderer among them? The ratings spike as the country tunes in to a real life murder mystery. Detective Patrik Hedstrom finds himself increasingly unable to focus on the strange circumstances of the first case, but what if that holds the key to a series of other unsolved cases across Sweden? Under the unforgiving media spotlight, Patrik tackles his toughest investigation yet.

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Semper Fidelis by Ruth Downie

Semper_FidelisThis is the next in the MEDICUS series by Ruth Downie:

Back at his post as a doctor in the Twentieth legion in Roman-occupied Britain, Ruso uncovers a new danger even closer to home than the neighboring barbarians.

As mysterious injuries, and even deaths, begin to appear in the medical ledgers, it’s clear that all is not well amongst the native recruits to Britannia’s imperial army. Is the much- decorated Centurion Geminus preying on his weaker soldiers? And could this be related to the appearance of Emperor Hadrian?

Bound by his sense of duty and ill-advised curiosity, Ruso begins to ask questions nobody wants to hear. Meanwhile his barbarian wife, Tilla, is finding out some of the answers-and marked as a security risk by the very officers Ruso is interrogating.

With Hadrian’s visit looming large, the fates of the legion, Tilla, and Ruso himself hang in the balance.

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The Good Thief’s Guide to Berlin by Chris Ewan

TGTGT_BerlinYou can’t keep a good thief down . . . Charlie Howard is back and robbing the city of Berlin blind, until he witnesses a murder being committed right before his eyes

Charlie Howard, part-time writer, part-time thief, has been engaged in a veritable spree of larceny and misappropriation since moving to Berlin, Germany. He’s supposed to be working on his next novel. But high rent and a love for thrill-seeking has been hard on his word count.

But Charlie’s larcenous binge is interrupted by the call to duty—on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. Four embassy employees are suspected of stealing a sensitive item. Charlie is to break into their homes, find the culprit and recover the stolen property. But there’s a catch. The item is so sensitive, Charlie isn’t told what he’s looking for. Not its size, not its weight, nothing. He’s only told that he’ll recognize it when he sees it.

Charlie has been a successful thief because he follows his own rules, the first being “Don’t get caught.” Well, after he enters the first suspect’s home, he has to add a new rule: ”Don’t admire the view.” As Charlie stares across the street, he sees something he really wishes he hadn’t—a woman being murdered. And that’s just for starters. What follows is a wild adventure in the former cauldron of spies.

With The Good Thief’s Guide to Berlin, Chris Ewan shows why he was voted as one of America’s favorite British authors by a Huffington Post poll. Clever and wildly entertaining, this is a mystery series that is ”big fun” (The Seattle Times).

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Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Oliver_Twistred_earphonesOne of Charles Dickens’ most popular novels, Oliver Twist is the story of a young orphan who dares to say, “Please, sir, I want some more”. After escaping from the dark and dismal workhouse where he was born, Oliver finds himself on the mean streets of Victorian-era London and is unwittingly recruited into a scabrous gang of scheming urchins. In this band of petty thieves, Oliver encounters the extraordinary and vibrant characters who have captured audiences’ imaginations for more than 150 years: the loathsome Fagin, the beautiful and tragic Nancy, the crafty Artful Dodger, and the terrifying Bill Sikes, perhaps one of the greatest villains of all time.

Rife with Dickens’ disturbing descriptions of street life, the novel is buoyed by the purity of the orphan Oliver. Though he is treated with cruelty and surrounded by coarseness for most of his life, his pious innocence leads him at last to salvation – and the shocking discovery of his true identity.

Here’s the really wonderful review given this audiobook by AudioFile Magazine:

You see the book’s title, and you make certain assumptions. It’s a classic. It’s uniquely English. And it will capture (or recapture) your imagination as only great books can. If you’ve never read it, let this version be your introduction. If you’ve already experienced it in print, then indulge yourself in a terrific audio experience. From the very start–and I mean the first word of this production–narrator Simon Vance raises a banner that announces a once-in-a-lifetime performance that exquisitely matches narrator and text. Vance has a mellifluous English voice, an engaging tone, and marvelous diction. The elastic quality of his voice delightfully differentiates the myriad characters that live between Dickens’s pages. The result is a wonderful listening experience for all ages–not to be missed. R.I.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013

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Hero on a Bicycle by Shirley Hughes

Hero_BicycleIn her first novel, beloved author Shirley Hughes presents a World War II adventure proving that in extraordinary circumstances, people are capable of extraordinary things.

Italy, 1944: Florence is occupied by Nazi forces. The Italian resistance movement has not given up hope, though — and neither have thirteen-year- old Paolo and his sister, Costanza. As their mother is pressured into harboring escaping POWs, Paolo and Costanza each find a part to play in opposing the German forces. Both are desperate to fight the occupation, but what can two siblings — with only a bicycle to help them — do against a whole army? Middle-grade fans of history and adventure will be riveted by the action and the vividly evoked tension of World War II.

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