Publisher, Blackstone Audiobooks (October 2007)

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Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award

“Frederick Davidson gives such a splendid dramatization of this family saga…it's almost like watching theater. Davidson matches his versatile voice to each one of the principals. He also manages to distinguish with equal elasticity among a host of vivid and disparate supporting characters. Thanks to Davidson's seamless delivery, the narrative sweeps the listener through [nearly] 40 hours of sustained drama.” —AudioFile

“Dickens willed into existence the most capacious and elastic and versatile kind of novel that could be, one big enough for his vast sentimental yearnings and for every impulse and fear and hesitation in him that countervailed those yearnings too. Never parsimonious and frequently contradictory, he always gives us everything he can, everything he’s planned to give, and then more.” — Jonathan Lethem

In this carefully crafted novel, Dickens reveals the complexity of London society in the enterprising 1840s as he takes the listener into the business firm and home of one of its most representative patriarchs, Paul Dombey. A sensitive family drama unfolds between this stern father, his two children and aloof wife in which time and fateful events bring a slow, inexorable pressure to bear upon the hearts of all. in Paul Dombey we witness the force of social and personal arrogance ("For Dombey is as proud, Ma'am, as Lucifer") wrestling with his own stubborn, but not unredeemable, heart.

About the Author: Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was born in Landport, Portsea, England, the second of eight children in a family continually plagued by debt. A legacy brought release from the nightmare of debtors’ prison and child labor and afforded him two years of formal schooling. He worked as an attorney’s clerk and newspaper reporter until his early writings brought him the amazing success that was to be his for the