Audiobook · read by volunteers
Golden Age
Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932)
Read by Erin Hastings, Sarah Kerrison, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Catharine Eastman, Esther, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), vanrose, Mark F. Smith, Peter Eastman, Muhammad Mussnoon · 18 chapters · 3 h 57
About the book
Childhood, remembered by a grown-up, has never been so clear. Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age is a collection of sketches in which a group of children live in a world of their own, a world in which the grown-ups, whom they call the Olympians, are a puzzling race with strange habits and little imagination. A holiday, a white-washed uncle, the alarums and excursions of the nursery, all are described with affectionate irony. The narrator is a child, but the voice that tells it is that of a writer looking back with wit and tenderness. Eighteen recordings, about four hours, in a volume admired by readers who love the author of The Wind in the Willows.
Introduction
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was a Scottish writer who spent much of his working life at the Bank of England and who is best known for his children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. The Golden Age came earlier. It is a collection of reminiscences of childhood, originally published in book form in 1895 in London by The Bodley Head and in Chicago by Stone and Kimball. The prologue and six of the stories had already appeared in a periodical before they were collected.
The book is not a novel in the ordinary sense. It is a series of linked sketches, with recurring characters and a consistent point of view, that of a child, narrated with the gentle comedy of an adult who remembers. The children regard the adults, called the Olympians, as beings from a remote and baffling world, and much of the humour comes from the gap between what the adult world thinks it is doing and how the children interpret it.
Titles such as A Holiday, A White-Washed Uncle and Alarums and Excursions give a sense of the range of episodes, from ordinary days to small crises.
The recording was made by LibriVox volunteers and has eighteen files, running about four hours. It is a good book for those who want to recapture the feel of childhood, or to see where a beloved author’s imagination was nourished. The sketches can be heard in any order, and each is complete in itself, so the book is ideal for a quiet half hour at a time over several days.
Public domain
Kenneth Grahame died in 1932: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text