Waiting for Sunrise cover art

Waiting for Sunrise

 Preview
LIMITED TIME OFFER

3 Months Free

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Get this deal
Offer ends on 15 July 2026 at 11:59 BST.
More purchase options

Waiting for Sunrise

By: William Boyd
Narrated by: Jack Rowan
Get this deal

£5.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.

Buy Now for £11.20

Buy Now for £11.20

Brought to you by Penguin.

Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the enigmatic, intensely beautiful Hettie Bull walks in, Lysander is immediately drawn to her, unaware of how destructive the consequences of their subsequent affair will be. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous web of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life...

© William Boyd 2012 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 20th Century Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction World War I Fiction England
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
All stars
Most relevant
It is a pity that the narration is so poor. It is monotonous without any feel, inflection or variance of tone. Nevertheless I stuck with it and eventually I became unaware of this problem. The story was quite interesting and had enough pace. Not the best work of fiction but I enjoyed it enough.

Poor Narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
This has to be the worst read book on Audible. I am surprised that Penguin (and William Boyd?) chose this actor to read it. Huge number of mispronunciations and a very irritating Cockney accent for virtually all the characters. All they did was jar and get in the way of the story.

William Boyd’s ‘Any Human Heart’ and ‘Restless’ are superb novels. I thought this was a much weaker effort with poor pacing and too much descriptive flannel which added little to the narrative drive of the story.

Final verdict- disappointing.

Appallingly read - disappointing story

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I love William Boyd’s work and yet again this is a beautifully researched yarn that twists and turns and takes the reader on a thrilling journey. However, they chose the wrong narrator and it’s gratingly distracting. Put simply, he has the wrong accent for an upper middle class protagonist so any dialogue voiced as the main character is utterly unconvincing. The narrator consistently mispronounces any word over 2 syllables, putting stresses on the wrong syllables and generally butchering the text.
He also, clearly, has never studied French which is a problem because there are a lot of French place names in the book. As a result I had to keep stopping and rewinding to try to decipher the narration. As I’m Welsh I found his mispronunciation of ‘Llanelli’ particularly awful. It’s not difficult to fix any of this, just check pronunciation with a native speaker.

Another Boyd tour de force but let down by narrator

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’m a fan of William Boyd ( Any Human Heart is terrific ) but this book was ruined by the narrator’s complete lack of ability to do any accents at all apart from cockney, to vary the the different characters voices ( one was so grating it hurt to listen to him ) and finally he couldn’t actually pronounce words. Quadrangle became quandrangle and he pronounced the ‘ l ‘ in Folkestone to name two of many. It did distract from the story when the narrator couldn’t actually read or got the emphasis on the wrong syllable of a word.

Interesting story ruined by awful narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The story would have been enjoyable, I think - but the narrator’s insistence of not pronouncing any ‘Ts’ completely spoiled it for me and I couldn’t get past the first chapter. I’m afraid good English pronunciation for audible is essential to my enjoyment of the books.

Poor narration

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
See more reviews