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    The House on the Strand
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    The House on the Strand
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    The House on the Strand
    Audiobook11 hours

    The House on the Strand

    Written by Daphne Du Maurier

    Narrated by Ron Keith

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    "The House on the Strand is prime du Maurier." --New York Times

    Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his scientific research.

    When Dick samples Magnus's potion, he finds himself doing the impossible: traveling through time while staying in place, thrown all the way back into Medieval Cornwall. The concoction wear off after several hours, but its effects are intoxicating and Dick cannot resist his newfound powers. As his journeys increase, Dick begins to resent the days he must spend in the modern world, longing ever more fervently to get back into his world of centuries before, and the home of the beautiful Lady Isolda...
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateAug 19, 2014
    ISBN9781478956310
    Unavailable
    The House on the Strand
    Author

    Daphne Du Maurier

    Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989) has been called one of the great shapers of popular culture and the modern imagination. Among her more famous works are The Scapegoat, Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, and the short story "The Birds," all of which were subsequently made into films—the latter three directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

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    Reviews for The House on the Strand

    4/5

    16 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I don't know why I've always been reluctant about reading Daphne du Maurier's work: I don't know what I thought it was going to be like, because both this and Rebecca were atmospheric and intriguing. Slower than your average thrillers maybe, but I do think there's something in them that captures the mind. A little patience works wonders.

      The narrator's background contempt for Vita, not fully realised by himself, is both well written and discomforting: the hints at the end that it could have been all in his mind are interesting -- it seems almost a cliché looking at it that way, but it read well here, and oh, the ending.

      I got into the medieval story than the modern one; like the narrator I found it more real, full of passion and life -- which really, I suppose, shows it to be a fiction, or at least that the narrator experiences it in the episodic manner of fiction, while his real life remains unsatisfactory.

      Anyway, like the narrator I'm glad to have experienced Roger and Isolda's stories. And I can understand the draw of them for the protagonist, and how prepared he is to throw what he has away to see them, to know them.

      I'm half wishing I was writing the dissertation on time travel we all joked about in the first semester of my MA. It'd give me an excuse to keep on thinking about this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      It took me a long time to get into this book, but I'm not sure why. The main character takes a drug that causes him to hallucinate that the is seeing what happened six hundred years before and he becomes more interested in these people than in what is going on in his current life. From there, it's a struggle between the past and the present for his attention. About halfway through the book, I found the past story more interesting as well and from then on it was a good read.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Time travel - with a twist! Rather than the typical story, where a historic character gets transported to the modern world, (or vise versa)...this one involves a drug that makes the user see what's A happened in the past, while he is still physically in the present. There are complications to this version of time travel too! Well worth a read!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Daphne du Maurier was probably incapable of writing a bad book. Rebecca was one of the best ever written and a harsh yardstick to use but the truth is that this falls really a long way short.There is no one to excel du Maurier when it comes to overlaying an ordinary domestic scene with a tint of menace but there is nothing of the sort here.Briefly, Dick Young is an old college friend of Professor Magnus Lane. In return for the use of his Cornish home as a summer retreat for Young and his family, Lane has prevailed upon his friend to test a new drug that appears to have the effect of enabling the user to witness events of the past at first hand. In Young's case, this proves to be the 14th Century. So we follow the progress of his stay in Cornwall in the present day, interleaved with what he witnesses in the past.Of course, it is a device of du Maurier's to tell a straight-forward story and then throw a box of spanners into the works. In "The House on the Strand", though, the use of alternating narratives leads to this first stage being dragged out too long and the whole thing proceeds at a snail's pace for better part of two-thirds of the book. The novel desperately needs some of that trade-mark du Maurier menace; without that tension, it starts to drag, badly.In the last hundred pages, when the spanners hit, the pace picks up and we get some tension and something altogether more like we've been expecting from du Maurier.In fact, the tale ends quite well - not very well, but quite well - but I suspect that many readers will have consigned the book to the jumble sale box long before they get that far.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Dick Young goes to Cornwall to stay in a home belonging to close friend and scientist, Magnus. He is persuaded to experiment with a drug the Professor has concocted which takes him back in time to the 14th Century. His fascination for this previous time is not without consequences.I enjoyed this story more having recently visited the area in which it was set. Although I found it difficult to relate with Dick and found his character somewhat shallow. Not one of my favourite du MAurier books.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      As usual Daphne does not let me down. This is a timeless story that could have been written this year, not in the late 1960s.The story is of a time travelling potion which allows the main character to travel back in time to visit his local area. The two times blurr for the character with profound consequences. The story was intriguing and ingenious. Well worth a visit.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Time travel and the 14th Century…what more can one want in a book? OK, a lot more, but let’s go with these two as the starter for this one.Richard Young is staying at his friend Magnus Lane’s home in the English countryside. Magnus is a chemical researcher at the University of London and has concocted a drink, that when taken, will transport a person to the 14th Century. The one catch is that the traveler cannot touch any person while on the trip or they will be instantly hurled back to the present rather painfully. Richard, while waiting for his wife and step-sons to arrive, agrees to take the potion and report back to Magnus with the results. The potion has the same affect on Richard as Magnus and they compare their trips to the past observing the daily lives of the people who used to live in the same area where Magnus’s house is. Richard becomes fascinated with the past so much so that he keeps returning to see one particular woman that he has become obsessed with. His sense of reality takes a turn and he starts to have trouble deciphering the past and the present which frightens him but not enough to stop him from taking what is left of the potion like some madman believing he can change the outcome of the past. The results of his actions make the present a terrifying place for both Richard and his family.Time travel in books can sometimes go bad but Du Maurier does something that makes it work --- she makes it unbelievable. That might sound odd but stick with me. For a good portion of the book, Richard isn’t sure what he’s seeing and he isn’t sure he should believe it. When he starts to believe, things go off track in his life making him wonder if what he thinks he believes is true. Even when some historical research proves that the people he saw and observed on his trips were real, he still isn’t sure what to think or believe. Life becomes difficult for him on so many levels and it seems as if you’re watching a man on the brink of madness. How Du Maurier does this is fascinating and makes the whole idea of time travel so fantastical and terrifying at the same time.Richard was not a person I liked at first. I didn’t dislike him either but he’s a selfish person and one who doesn’t seem to think, or care, much for his family which is truly annoying. Magnus however was a character I would have liked more of. His ambiguity makes it work though because you get back to the idea of Richard slowly falling into the depths of madness without Magnus around.There is so much to like about this book. The fantasy element is done well, and even though you’re not sure if it truly exists outside of Richard’s mind, it works and is believable. There are rules and consequences to the time travel and I like that. A free system wouldn’t work here and Du Maurier creates a system that fits perfectly within the confines of the story. The characters all have some sort of flaw that makes even the annoying ones likable, to a degree. You do in the end sympathize with everyone which I wasn’t prepared to do half way through the book.I will be adding more of Du Maurier’s books to my list. Her writing is wonderfully descriptive and at the same time sparse, as if she’s giving you time to ingest it all.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I read this novel some time ago, and it has to rank as one of the most boring implementations of time-travel in all of fiction. First, the main character doesn't go anywhere. He just "sees" the past while still in the present; this eventually ends up as you might expect. Second, nothing really interesting happens in the past. Third, the relations between the past and the present are not interesting, either. The story just meanders on, showing the main character becoming increasingly obsessed with a past that means little to the reader. And the ending -- geez -- you can see it coming a mile away. I'd never read Du Mare and this book convinced me that he was a writer of singularly uninteresting, unemotional prose. But if you need to get to sleep, this is your book.
    • 4/5
      I’ve read these sorts of time traveling novels before, but this one was better than most. The detail of the lives of the people in the past were very compelling. In a footnote, it was said that du Maurier researched some actual people who had lived in her village in Cornwall and that is probably why it seemed more real than other books. As a matter of fact, I’m reading a new novel that takes place 20 years after Rebecca’s death and some of the same family names are appearing in that book as are used in this one.The relationship that Richard has with the professor who created the drink is weird. The professor is gay, apparently, and Richard is very lately married to a widow with 2 boys. The professor has come up with an elixir that supposedly taps into brain chemistry that houses racial memory. I couldn’t quite figure out if it would work no matter where you were physically, or if like in another book, you needed to be in a place or near an object that was very old and you would go back to see it in former times. And to what time? That was unclear also. Why were the professor and Richard taken back to 1360 or so instead of 1720 or 1566? Was it the beginning of the town and the buildings life or what? Or was it arbitrary? If it was, why did they both go to the same time? Why did they witness different events? I don’t think that either of them were related to the people from the past, so why did they have memories of them? Very strange. But it was intriguing. I couldn’t stand his wife. She was a pill. Of course he couldn’t explain his weird behavior and she immediately thought it was some other woman. Then she thought the professor had got him into something and she was still pissed even when he was killed (while wandering through the countryside in the other time, he was hit by a train) and left the house to Richard, she still held a grudge. I was happy when he broke with her and stayed in the house alone. But then he had run out of elixir. He had come to the end of certain events in the past and was satisfied, but then at the end, his hand got all wavery and he was going in and out of the other time (or so I conjecture) without the elixir. I kind of didn’t get if that’s what the last sentence was supposed to mean or not.
    • 5/5
      "We are all bound, one to the other, through time and eternity". While vacationing at the Cornwall home of old chum Magnus, Richard Young is convinced to act as guinea pig for his friend's latest experiment - a drug that enables the mind to travel into the past - although the body stays in the present. Richard's "trips" take him to the 14C where he is soon so wrapped up in the past that it becomes as addictive to him as a drug - or is it the drug itself that is addictive? Are the lives of those in the past so much more important that his wife and step-sons become a hindrance to his journeys? Did these people really exist or do they only exist in Richard's mind? Although Richard's mind is in the 14C while on the drug, his body is not and as he walks in the footsteps of those in the past it leads him into some very close calls when his mind returns to the present. He could be standing anywhere - the middle of a road, on private property or in the path of an oncoming....... Nope, I'm not telling and to say much more gives the whole thing away - half the fun is the guessing and unexpected twists in the story. Although the segments in the 14C were well written they were a bit confusing to me at times, but don't spend too much time trying to sort those relationships out. IMO they were mostly background and the main focus were the parts in the present day. Du Maurier is superb and understated as always, and this one will definitely leave you guessing all the way to the very last page and beyond.
    • 3/5
      I found this book rather disappointing. The premise is really fascinating: the main character travels in time by taking a drug that unlocks a sort of collective memory in his brain, and he hallucinates about events in the 14th century. I really like this idea of time travel, and the complications it causes: he moves around in the contemporary world while he hallucinates about the 14th century, so he will be suddenly jarred into the present when he bumps into a modern building or almost gets hit by a car.But this isn't really a book about time travel. It's a book about drug addiction. The narrator enjoys his time travel, despite some of the horrible physical side-effects. He behaves like a typical drug addict: he lies to his wife, is very secretive about his activities, is very jealous of his opportunities to take the drug, and spends all of his time looking forward to his next trip. He eventually endangers his family, and continues to endanger himself despite the obvious risks involved. The medieval storyline isn't very interesting - not much happens, and there is nothing particularly compelling about any of the medieval characters (although one of the reasons the narrator keeps traveling to the past is that he has a crush on one of the medieval women). There is decent closure to the medieval storyline, but the focus of the book is really the narrator's drug addiction and its dangerous effects. Unfortunately, it's hard to sympathize with his addiction: he is so obviously destructive to himself and his family, and the medieval storyline hardly seems worth the risk.
    • 5/5
      I'm struck by how much more I liked this book upon a second reading. It's even more surprising given the lack of truly empathetic characters.The story and structure are well-executed, and I suppose it is additional research and study that has helped me to appreciate the writing so much more.
    • 4/5
      The concept was intriguing, but the chapters in which the narrator went back to the 1300's were pretty boring. I simply did not care what was going on with those characters. Lord So-and-So was cheating on Lady Whoever etc. etc. It was difficult to track the relationships. The thing that kept me reading was the sub-plot set in the narrator's real life. The increasing tension between the narrator and his wife, and his increasing addiction to the time travel drug, were well written.
    • 4/5
      A fascinating story about time travel under the influence of drugs between 1960s Cornwall and early 14th century in the same places, greatly changed over the intervening centuries. The narrator becomes more and more involved in 14th century life, finally getting confused between details and personalities in that century and his own. It has some shocking consequences, especially the implied final event. Very good, with some of the same air of mystery as Rebecca, albeit very different in many respects. Only slight criticisms are that the characters are a bit cliched and some of the description of the landscape drags a bit. But the author clearly loved her Cornwall.
    • 5/5
      First read when I was all of 12, I still love the imagination that sparks this book.