Trespass

The most important feature of this production is Bernadette Dunne's narration. Besides handling various foreign accents well, she refuses to yield to the melodrama of one character after another. Martin offers no insights into stories of war-ravaged Bosnia and Yugoslavia that might as well have been culled from news stories. Women are raped; children are killed before their mothers' eyes. Characters' actions are predictable at best, unintentionally farcical at worst. The opening chapters, centered around an American college student and his foreign-born fiancée, set high expectations for what's to come, but as soon as she steps off familiar terrain, Martin falters. Luckily, the quality of Dunne's narration keeps the listener's attention. R.R. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine


TRESPASS is many things: an atmospheric gothic mystery, an exploration of sibling and family relationships, and a clash between traditional residents and those expats and vacationers who swoop in and send housing and cost-of-living prices skyrocketing. Most of all, TRESPASS is a fabulous story, and an even better audiobook experience. Narrator Juliet Stevenson makes this multifaceted story completely engrossing. Stevenson's narration captivates, imparting exactly the right amount of suspense and pronouncing the French place names with a perfection that will have listeners yearning to visit the south of France. Rarely are a book and a narrator as superb and perfectly matched as TRESPASS and Juliet Stevenson. J.L.K. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

July 9, 2007
This thought-provoking novel by Orange Prize–winning Martin (for Property
) opens deceptively, as the quiet story of a mother slowly adjusting to her 21-year-old son becoming an adult. In 2002, Chloe Dane is a loving mother and wife, an artist engrossed in illustrating a new edition of Wuthering Heights
and a protestor against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Her husband, Brendan, is a historian who doubts that his work has any value but is generally self-satisfied. When their only child, Toby, a junior at NYU, gets Salome Drago, his Croatian immigrant girlfriend, pregnant and hastily marries her, Chloe fears he was trapped by a calculating woman more interested in Toby’s family’s impressive house and property than in Toby. When Salome learns her mother, Jelena, whom she believed was killed by Serbs, is alive, she traces her to Trieste and abruptly departs to find her. Toby follows, and when the newlyweds decide to drop out of college and remain in Italy, Chloe sends Brendan to bring Toby home. A tragedy—one very convenient for the narrative—strikes while Brendan’s in Italy, paving the way for a startlingly light resolution. Forgiveness doesn’t come easy for the characters as they learn that nothing—not family, borders or survival—is inviolable.

February 15, 2008
When Toby introduces his mother to a new college girlfriend, his mother is unsettled by the broodingly serious young woman who has beguiled her only child. Salome soon announces that she's pregnant, leaving Toby's mother, Chloe, heartbroken and seething with suspicion about their marriage of necessity. His mother's animosity toward his beautiful new wife alienates Toby, while his father attempts to mediate as peacemaker. Chloe is also disconcerted by a poacher hunting rabbits on their property. After Salome's mother, long thought dead in war-torn Yugoslavia, is discovered alive in Trieste, Italy, Salome mysteriously disappears. This story of an affluent family in rural New York is more than its plot elements, crackling with suspense and edginess from the first page. Martin, winner of the Orange Prize for her novel Property, envelops the listener in the same disquieting atmosphere of trespass and violation that obsesses Chloe. Audie Award nominee Bernadette Dunne never takes sides, forcing the listener to assess each character's veracity. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo

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