Three Men in a Boat

Nov 9, 2025 9:31 PM

Author:Jerome K. Jerome,Blake Harrison,Jeremy Lewis

Three Men in a Boat

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Blake Harrison, star of The Inbetweeners, also known for his roles on screen in A Very English Scandaland Todd Margaret, as well as on London's West End in Waitress. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by David Carroll.

Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead with tow-ropes, unreliable weather-forecasts and tins of pineapple chunks - not to mention the devastation left in the wake of J.'s small fox-terrier Montmorency. Three Men in a Boat was an instant success when it appeared in 1889, and, with its benign escapism, authorial discursions and wonderful evocation of the late-Victorian 'clerking classes', it hilariously captured the spirit of its age.

Reviews

The Dante of the Twentieth Century

—— W. H. Auden

This compelling, prophetic novel anticipates the insanity of modern bureaucracy and the coming of totalitarianism

—— The Daily Telegraph

It is the fate and perhaps the greatness of that work that it offers everything and confirms nothing

—— Albert Camus

It was Kafka who made me understand that one can write differently

—— Gabriel García Márquez

Where Yoko Ogawa's brilliance lies is in taking such an apparently stiff framework and bending it into a work of warmth and beauty; or showing us that mathematics is not a cold, hard, science, but an elegant, complex, shimmering art. This feat of literary spoon-bending is accomplished with such calm elegance that it quite takes the breath away

—— The Times Book Club

The novel gallops forward, full of danger, delight and surprise. Nearly miraculous, it seems, is Pullman's ability to sketch character, place and motive in just a few lines

—— New Statesman

A long, taxing, complex journey, laced with beauty, terror and philosophy

—— Metro

As ever, Pullman's story is complex and vast but home to some of the finest storytelling in the 21st century. Revel in whole new worlds and enjoy one of literature's most wonderful heroines before she comes to HBO and the BBC

—— Stylist

Pullman is confronting readers with the horrors of our own world reflected back at us. In The Secret Commonwealth he creates a fearful symmetry

—— The Herald

Pullman has created a fantasy world, made yet more satisfying in this new volume. This is a book for getting older with

—— Guardian

REVIEWS FOR LA BELLE SAUVAGE: THE BOOK OF DUST VOLUME ONE:

Fans of His Dark Materials will find themselves joyfully immersed in a familiar world . . . meanwhile, awaiting first-time readers is all the pleasure of commencing their own journey into this most captivating of universes at the very beginning of Lyra's story

—— Independent

No one else writes like Pullman . . . entirely worth the 17-year wait

—— Imogen Russell Williams, Metro

A rich, imaginative, vividly characterised rite-of-passage tale

—— Nicolette Jones, The Sunday Times

High-octane adventure accompanies ingenious plotting

—— The Times

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