Booklog 12/26: Robert Harris: The Second Sleep – Audiobook

2026-01-26T02:12:18Z

Audiobook narrated by Roy McMillan

Christopher Fairfax, priest, rides across remote Exmoor in the 1400s, sent by the Bishop of Exeter, to find an isolated village with a dead priest awaiting burial… except it’s not the 1400s you might think. This is gradually revealed to be a post-apocalyptic landscape, 800 years after some unknown cataclysm. It’s regressed to pre-industrial revolution levels of living. Science is proscribed, and even researching into the past and its artifacts can get you branded (literally) a heretic. The church is law. Law is the church. What Fairfax finds in that village leads him to question truths that have always been self-evident to a young believer. Expect religion, science and the apocalypse. The writing is superb, the story gripping, and Roy McMillan (who also narrated Conclave) is a perfect narrator. He subsumes his narration to the story while still subtly delineating character voices.

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Booklog 32/2025: Robert Harris: Conclave

2025-05-23T20:28:12Z

Audiobook narrated by Roy Mcmillan

Just having seen the excellent movie, and with a Roman Catholic Conclave happening to elect a new pope in real life, it seemed an appropriate time to listen to this book. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel 118 cardinals are hoping to be guided by God to make the right choice, but though no one will admit it some cardinals have more ambition than others to become the head of the church. There are factions and rivalries, and through it all Cardinal Jacopo Lomeli, the Dean of the College of Cardinals, must keep order and direct the proceedings. This is a thriller filled with old men in robes, with no action sequences and no sex and violence, but tightly plotted and riveting all the same. Highly recommended.

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Jacey Bedford's Journal

Booklog 12/26: Robert Harris: The Second Sleep – Audiobook

Booklog 32/2025: Robert Harris: Conclave