That said her ability to appropriately read dialects in a natural tone is an amazing talent. Nadia May has wonderful tone, pace, diction and an ability to tell a story without drawing attention to herself. I have had this audiobook for more than a decade and never got around to listening to it until now but it is still as wonderful as the day I bought it - and now there are so many other readings available but this is still the one I would choose. There are some audiobook readers whose narrations never fail and among those I would place Nadia May. Nadia May is a comfortable narrator, reliable as a rock, and I very much enjoyed her performance. She's a gentle, loving, peaceful soul, and one of the few utterly believable persons of faith I've encountered in fiction. Until the Conference forbids it, Dinah plays the unusual role of itinerant preacher. One of the more remarkable achievements in the book is the character Dinah, an early Methodist. The ending is less grim than it would have been in Hardy's hands, and there is considerably more country-folkish humor throughout the book but not everyone makes it through, and there is a kind of autumnal poignancy about the last moments. In some ways the book could have been written by Thomas Hardy. Arthur and Adam fight Arthur goes off to join his regiment Hatty decides to marry Adam after all but as the day approaches, she discovers (in wonderfully elliptical Victorian prose) that she's pregnant.

(Some of the dinner-table conversation revolves around Bony - Napoleon - and the threat he and the armies of France pose.) Adam is a carpenter who's in love with Hatty but Hatty's head has been turned by Arthur, the son of the local squire. As a narrator, Eliot annoys me as a narrative, the book is a graceful and moving story about life and love in a small village as the 18th century slides into the 19th. She's forever reaching after generalizations, but many of them ring as false to me as the narrative itself rings true. On the other hand, she's always interrupting her narrative to tell me how to think about it. On one hand, she writes beautifully crafted novels filled with interesting and solid characters. I have a kind of love/hate relationship with George Eliot.

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