The Prelude To Adventure: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Prelude To Adventure, credited to Hugh Walpole, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Prelude To Adventure by Hugh Walpole. Read in English by David Wales Olva Dune is a Cambridge undergraduate who commits a murder and at that moment feels the presence of God. In a tour de force Walpole novelizes the Francis Thompson poem The Hound of Heaven, about a fearful soul pursued by an insistently loving God. (One could enrich the reading of the novel by first reading the poem (“I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;… Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue…. Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,/ Save Me, save only Me?”). The psychologist Carl Jung, in a letter to the author, called the 1911 novel “a psychological masterpiece.” Hergesheimer on this novel: “So excellent is the versatility of Hugh Walpole that this writer of dignified and realistic and always beautiful pictures of life has among his books one with all the tension and strange plot of a Poe masterpiece… What happened is so filled with suspense that, very real and human though it is, the plot comes to have all the unexpectedness of the cleverest detective story…. Suspense--color of life--love--fear--triumph--they all mingle in an atmosphere as effective as the Cornish sea.” - Summary by David Wales

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Prelude To Adventure
• Author credits: Hugh Walpole
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 17
• Listed recording duration: 6:10:11

Catalogue topics

• Mystery
• psychological novel
• murder mystery
• the hound of heaven
• francis thompson
• coming of age novel

Track guide

1. 00 - Dedication And Epigraph — 1:15
2. 01 - Last Chapter — 22:26
3. 02 - Bunning — 23:35
4. 03 - The Body Comes To Town — 22:21
5. 04 - Margaret Craven — 25:25
6. 05 - Stone Altars — 23:31
7. 06 - The Watchers — 24:04
8. 07 - Terror — 15:40
9. 08 - Revelation Of Bunning (1) — 22:57
10. 09 - Revelation Of Bunning (II) — 25:39
11. 10 - Craven — 17:54
12. 11 - Fifth Of November — 28:44
13. 12 - Love To The 'Valse Triste' — 18:52
14. 13 - Mrs. Craven — 19:17
15. 14 - God — 32:12
16. 15 - Prelude To A Journey — 22:07
17. 16 - Olva And Margaret; First Chapter — 24:12

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.