Charlotte Street

The laugh out loud romantic comedy with a twist for fans of Nick Hornby

De: Danny Wallace

Narrado por: Mackenzie Crook, Wendy Wason

It all starts with a girl... (because yes, there's always a girl...)

Jason Priestley (not that one) has just seen her. They shared an incredible, brief, fleeting moment of deep possibility, somewhere halfway down Charlotte Street.

And then, just like that, she was gone - accidentally leaving him holding her old-fashioned, disposable camera, chock full of undeveloped photos...

And now Jason - ex-teacher, ex-boyfriend, part-time writer and reluctant hero - faces a dilemma. Should he try and track The Girl down? What if she's The One? But that would mean using the only clues he has, which lie untouched in this tatty disposable...

It's funny how things can develop...


Mackenzie Crook is best known for playing Gareth in The Office, a role for which he earned two BAFTA nominations, and Ragetti in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. He also provided his voice and movements to a character in Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin.

Wendy Wason was a regular in several comedy series such as Tittybangbang and The IT Crowd, and she has also appeared in Midsomer Murders. As a comedian, she has also had three successful Edinburgh Festival shows.

Reseñas de la Crítica

One of this year's coolest must-reads

Charlotte Street is charming, funny, romantic and quite adorable

Full of funny observations

We loved this funny romance with a twist

A brilliantly funny boy-meets-girl story

A moving, funny, all-too-relatable tale of boy seeking girl, with some gripping twists and turns...an unmissable read which will have you laughing out loud and melt your heart, all at once

A very clever twist on the age old story of boy meets girl...brilliantly-conceived, funny and moving

Looks set to be this summer's One Day...a delight

My top tip for 2012's runaway success, with a very clever twist on the age old story of boy meets girl (Henry Sutton)

...[one of] this year's coolest must-reads

The narrators earned more than the book did.

Charlotte Street is a plot-light, humor-driven contemporary novel about a man trying to find a stranger who accidentally left her disposable camera with him. The audiobook has two narrators: Mackenzie Crook handles Jason and Wendy Wason takes the supporting cast. Both are competent and warm, and the humor lands better in audio than it does on the page. Crook in particular suits Jason's whiny, overthinking register, which is either a compliment or a warning depending on your tolerance for that kind of protagonist.

The narration is genuinely the reason I finished this book. The plot moves at a pace that would try anyone's patience in print. In audio, the humor has better delivery and the character dynamics, particularly Jason and Dev, feel more alive. Wason differentiates the supporting characters clearly enough that you always know where you are.

The flow is consistent but the pacing of the source material makes the audio feel long. At no fault of the narrators, 400 pages of very little happening is still 400 pages of very little happening. The chapter transitions are clean and there are no unique audio elements.

If you're going to read Charlotte Street, audio is the format I'd suggest. Crook and Wason give it more than it perhaps deserves, and the humor lands best when someone is delivering it rather than when you're reading it off a page.