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The End of the Affair

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The End of the Affair

By: Graham Greene
Narrated by: Colin Firth
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Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)

Audie Award Winner, Audiobook of the Year, 2013

Audie Award Nominee, Best Solo Narration, 2013

Academy Award-winning actor Colin Firth (The King’s Speech) won the Audie for Audiobook of the Year in 2013—for his first audio performance, The End of the Affair. The love affair at the center of this 1951 classic novel takes place in the bomb-strewn last days of World War II, and just after. Bendrix, a writer in war-torn London, has fallen in love with Sarah, the wife of an acquaintance. Though unhappily married, Sarah won’t leave her husband; she ends their affair and abruptly vanishes, reducing Bendrix's inner life to rubble. His investigation of Sarah’s disappearance reveals the role her newly-awakened Catholic faith played in her decision to leave, and other startling truths.

The End of the Affair mirrors Greene’s own relationship with a married woman, and positions religion as a pivotal element in both the inner turmoil and outer destruction occurring in his life at the time. Firth brilliantly conveys Greene’s characteristically bleak emotional terrain in an intimate, nuanced, and unhurried performance.

Explore more titles performed by some of the most celebrated actors in the business in Audible’s Star-Powered Listens collection.©1951 Graham Greene (P)2012 Audible, Inc. Audible Essentials Classics Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Marriage Heartfelt Emotionally Gripping British Classics

Go Behind the Scenes with Colin Firth

An accomplished stage and screen actor embraces a new medium: audio performance.
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Our favorite moments from The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair
Jilted lover and oblivious husband at the pub.
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The End of the Affair
The first glimpse of Sarah.
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The End of the Affair
Is he loved? The dour Bendrix has doubts.
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The End of the Affair
The thrill is gone, or so Bendrix jealously fears.
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  • The End of the Affair
  • Jilted lover and oblivious husband at the pub.
  • The End of the Affair
  • The first glimpse of Sarah.
  • The End of the Affair
  • Is he loved? The dour Bendrix has doubts.
  • The End of the Affair
  • The thrill is gone, or so Bendrix jealously fears.

About the Performer

Colin Firth was heart-stoppingly perfect as Darcy in BBC’s Pride and Prejudice, won an Oscar for playing the tongue-tied king in The King’s Speech, and continued to gain fans with his roles in Bridget Jones’s Diary, A Single Man, Love Actually, and many more films. In addition to having a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Firth won Audiobook of the Year in 2013 for his narration of The End of the Affair.

About the Author

Graham Greene, widely recognized as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, was born in Hertfordshire, England, and studied history at Oxford. A restless spirit, he traveled the world before settling in London and starting to write novels, including The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, and many more. Later recruited as a spy for his government, he based several of his novels in the shadowy world of double agents. But love and passion also caught his imagination, and he explored them from the perspective of an "agnostic Catholic" whose interest in Catholicism also played a big role in his work.
Complex Characters • Emotional Depth • Mesmerizing Voice • Philosophical Exploration • Psychological Complexity

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Colin Firth does an amazing job enlivening a very boring tale of a love affair ended by a silly promise to God made during a bombing in WWII London. I could not wait for this story to be over, and I have read and enjoyed many many novels that many find horribly boring (e.g., Moby Dick, Remembrance of Things Past). Daydreaming while listening to Firth's mellifluous voice and cadence, I recognized Ian McEwan in this story, and even O'Henry in the ironic twists that develop, but none of this was enough to pull this book out of the depths of dreariness. The characters are all insipid, and the plot is inane, but Firth is wonderful to listen to. Find something else he's read. I cannot recommend this novel.

Beautifully read, uninteresting story

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This book is a classic, exploring themes of love, hate and resentment over a broken relationship in a way perhaps totally unparalleled in any other work. The narration, obviously, is absolutely world class. In terms of narration alone, this would be in my top three.

Honestly, however, the book is not my style, and I found myself becoming bored in places other readers more interested in the deepest psychological workings of another might not. For me, psychological revelations are all well and good, but they need to be backed by something more substantial to hold my interest. Simply put, I guess I'm saying I need a plot. There isn't much of one here.

Still, I cannot bring myself to give this a poor rating, because I wholly recognize the significance of this work in cataloguing a part of human experience, and feel it is an important contribution to the body of literature. Maybe when I am older and more retrospective about my own relationships, I will come back to it. It's just that at this time, in my current mindset, lifestyle, or perhaps even mood, it is not for me.

If an introspective analysis of human emotion is what you are looking for however, you will find nothing better.

Classic story of love and hate that isn't for me

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What did you love best about The End of the Affair?

This is a great story anyway but Colin Firth does such an EXCELLENT job of reading it!! Wow!

What about Colin Firth’s performance did you like?

Colin Firth is one of the best actors so he could read this book doing each character to perfection.

Great Book. Great Narrator

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Where does The End of the Affair rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

First rate. Even though I knew the story (from the film), Firth's rendering made listening to the book mesmerizing. An exemplary performance.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Sarah was the most sympathetic character: her heartbreaking decision to break off her relationship with Maurice became understandable in light of her belief system.

What about Colin Firth’s performance did you like?

His tone of voice was superb. The characterization of the voices in the novel was spot on.

Who was the most memorable character of The End of the Affair and why?

Of couse it's Maurice, the narrator. As he changes from a man emboldened by lust for a married woman to a bereaved lover, his bittersweet acknowledgement of Sarah's sacrifice after her death and burial is a heartrending conclusion to this novel.

Colin Firth a wonderful reader.

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I can't say anything about Colin Firth's delivery that hasn't been said already. He won an an award for this performance and rightfully so - he handles heartbreak, bitterness, and too-bright all-consuming love with a reserved grace that captures the tone of the novel.

I would recommend this title on the strength of his narration alone.

The work itself is more difficult to fully embrace. The writing is clean, whittled to an unflinching truth but no less rich for that. Written in first person, the narrator, Maurice Bendrix, is consumed by jealousy and hatred (which is to say, love) for his former married mistress. Set in London, when Europe is in the last throws of war, Bendrix swings back and forth on an agonizing pendulum as he struggles with the wreckage of life after the affair. In him, Greene sets both the best and worst of human nature in direct juxtaposition; he shows that love and hate are as connected as an inhale and an exhale.

He takes the feeling in all its forms: physical, platonic, spiritual, obsessive, familial, divine; and places the enormous burden of that on one man's shoulders. Then he steps back and points at his narrator as if to say: "Look at how it twists him, look at how that much love and devotion and depth burns a man."

In lean prose, Greene's man Bendrix staggers under an emotion that is only capable of being fully born by a higher power. He blurs the line between humanity and divinity until loving and hating someone becomes an act of loving and hating God.

Religious or not, this book is insightful, complex, difficult; a classic worth the read.

Poignant, Introverted

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