The audiobook of Cardamine

I’m pleased to announce that my novel Cardamine: a New Zealand mystery is now available from Apple’s Audiobook Store.

Producing an audiobook in the traditional way, with the text read by live actors, is so expensive and time-consuming that I have never considered doing it. But I was recently invited through Draft2Digital to submit some of my fiction books for inclusion in Apple’s trial of using digital voices. It was free for me to take part, so I decided to accept.

Cardamine is set in New Zealand in the summer of 2019. Kate, on the last day of her backpacking holiday, loses her bag in a vineyard and misses her flight home to England. An eccentric elderly man comes to her rescue and invites her to stay on as his paid companion in his country home. The man’s wife is away, said to be back in her home country, but Kate comes to suspect that her absence has a more sinister explanation… 

My digital voice, called Amberley, has a British accent appropriate for the character of Kate. She’s not very good at pronouncing Māori place names, but otherwise I think she does a good job of telling the story. I am interested to see that Apple has set the price at twice that of the e-book, even though it was presumably very cheap to produce, and it will be interesting to see if anyone buys it.  

This book and some of my others others can be found at https://books2read.com/jenniferbarraclough