84, Charing Cross Road

by Helene Hanff Narrated by Barbara Rosenblat, John Franklyn-Robbins, Jill Tanner

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

What do you get when a freelance writer in NYC writes a letter to a used bookseller in London searching for a book? The beginning of a 20-year relationship. 84, Charing Cross Road is a delightful, poignant, funny classic love story that will charm your heart now as it did when it was first published in 1970.

When Helene Hanff makes an innocent inquiry about the possibility of purchasing hard-to-find books through Marks and Co., Booksellers, she begins a twenty-year love affair with Frank Doel, the proper English bookseller who answers her letter and sends along her first order in the fall of 1949.

They are two very unlikely correspondents: she a cranky Jewish New Yorker who writes TV scripts and lives in a messy apartment on East 95th Street; he a determinedly courteous middle-class Englishman who sends her beautifully bound and often obscure antiquarian books from the shop he manages on Charing Cross Road in London.

The letters, written between 1949 and 1969, capture the period and pay tribute to the special kind of reader who treasures a well-worn classic.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

What started as a request for an out-of-print book evolved into a 20-year friendship. In her saucy letters, Hanff playfully harangues the staff : "SLOTH: I could ROT over here before you'd send me anything to read." Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

From the Publisher

A real-life love story . . . A timeless period piece. Do read it.” ―The Wall Street Journal

“Those who have read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel comprised of only letters between the characters, will see how much that bestseller owes 84, Charing Cross Road.” —Medium.com

“[84, Charing Cross Road] will beguile an hour of your time and put you in tune with mankind. . . . It will provide an emollient for the spirit and a sheath for the exposed nerve.” —The New York Times

“A unique, throat-lumping, side-splitting treasure.” —San Francisco Examiner

“This book is the very simple story of the love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84, Charing Cross Road, London.” —Daily Telegraph (London)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171082482
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/24/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos