Ordeal

Ordeal, by Nevil Shute, published in Britain under the title What Happened to the Corbetts, 1939.  I couldn't get into this book when I started reading it but then listened to it on Recorded Books, read by Ian Stuart, was able to get into it and loved it.  

(I have much more patience with a book, even a book that's bad all the way through, if it's an audiobook.  When I was a kid I would force myself to finish a book once I had started reading it no matter what, which lead me to waste a lot of my childhood - I think because I had more faith in books.  If someone published it, it must be worthwhile!  Now I have more faith in myself and less in the publishing industry, so I've learned to be able to let go and stop reading a book if I don't like it.  My time also seems a lot more precious now that I'm an adult.  Audiobooks I'm more willing to put up with because I'm always doing something else (usually housecleaning or driving) while I'm listening, and I think the entertainment factor of having someone read it out loud makes it more bearable.  Also.. there's almost always something else to read at hand if I don't like a book, but I might be stuck with only one audiobook; better a bad one than nothing to listen to.  That's somewhat changed now thanks to my iphone, but more on that later.)  

Anyway, Ordeal was a book that Shute wrote right before WWII, in which he predicted what it would be like when the Germans bombed England, with such amazing accuracy that I don't think you would guess it was science fiction rather than a historical account of the war unless someone told you.  It's the account of an ordinary middle class family - father, mother, two young children and an infant -- who have to leave their bombed out house and town and end up sailing their small yacht to France so that the mother and children can take a ship to Canada and safety and so that the father can enlist.  That's it, that's the whole story, and it's told in the typical, beautiful, uniqe understated Shute way; a story of ordinary people who become heroes while remaining themselves under extraorindary circumstances.  Good lord, how the typical language of book reviews fails to express what a book is really like!  Well, it's an awesome book and Ian Stuart does a pretty good job narrating except for not even trying to do the little girl's voice justice.