CHARLOTTE GRAY

Samuel West has a splendid voice and makes it leap through hoops. He's slightly Scottish for Charlotte Gray, the eponymous beauty somewhat inclined to depression. He's English for the RAF pilot who gives her a reason to live. Then he's very "pip, pip" through the nostrils for the officers that send them both into France and behind enemy lines. Not a mindless thriller, really not a thriller at all, this is literature, an attempt to inhabit others. We come to understand the banality of evil, a Vichy France that not only collected its own people, but paid Germany for the trains they rode in and for the meals they ate on the way to the death camps. B.H.C. Winner of AUDIOFILE Earphones Award ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/JUL 99]