Most of this record belongs to a hardback rather than to an audiobook, and spotting that early turns a confusing product page into a fairly simple decision. G. A. Henty's 1896 novel of the Hundred Years' War runs eleven hours and forty minutes here, read by Jim Hodges, and those two facts are the entire audio half of the listing. Everything else, the identifier, the page count, the price, the sentence about illustrations, belongs to a printed object sitting on a shelf somewhere. Come for the story and the rest sorts itself out.
Stray Characters and an Orphaned Opening Line
Take the fields one at a time and the shape becomes obvious. Release date January 8, 2025. Publisher New West Press, though the publisher field opens with a stray invisible character ahead of the name, the kind of debris that survives an import and never gets cleaned. The identifier is a ten-digit book number rather than an audio code, and the same number reappears in the ISBN field with a check prefix bolted on. Page count, 273. Price, $20.96. Language, English, carrying that same invisible character. Two entries on this whole record describe a recording: the runtime and the reader's name.
Then the description begins, and its opening line is The White Hoods of Paris, sitting there like a chapter heading with nothing to attach itself to. The title field stops at At Agincourt and offers nothing further. A buyer searching for the phrase they half remember from a secondhand copy will never reach this page, and a buyer who does land here cannot tell whether the White Hoods line is a subtitle, a section name, or an artifact of whoever pasted the copy in. It reads like a subtitle. The record declines to confirm it.
Jim Hodges Carries English, French, and Rank
The story earns the arrival. Guy Aylmer joins Sir Eustace de Villeroy, his father's old friend, and when Lady Margaret de Villeroy and her children are sent to Paris as hostages against Sir Eustace's loyalty, Guy travels with them as page and bodyguard. Paris then falls to the butchers' guild, the White Hoods of that stray title line, and a boy whose job was carrying messages finds himself defending a household inside a capital that has turned on itself. The shape is old and it still works: an outsider attached to a family, a political catastrophe arriving from outside, and a siege forcing decisions well above his rank.
First published in 1896 and offered complete and unabridged, a claim the copy makes twice in different words. What that buys is a nineteenth-century narrative register: long paragraphs, explanatory asides about who holds which claim to what, and a hero whose competence arrives rather faster than his doubts. Read aloud, that register goes down easier than it does on the page, because a reader can carry a subordinate clause the eye trips over. Eleven hours and forty minutes is a genuine commitment, though, and the prose style is what decides whether you last the distance or bail at hour three.
Jim Hodges is credited as the sole reader, and the assignment is harder than the runtime alone suggests. The book moves between an English household and a Parisian mob, which means English names, French names, titles of rank and a great deal of formal address, all handled by one voice that has to keep the factions apart across nearly twelve hours. That is a pronunciation problem before it is ever a performance problem. A sample pulled from a scene with several speakers in it will tell you far more than one pulled from a description of a castle.
Wal Paget's Illustrations Exist Nowhere in the Credits
The copy advertises over twelve black and white illustrations by Wal Paget. Pictures do not travel into a recording, so that sentence belongs to the printed edition this description was lifted from, and it should not be read as a promise about the file. The sharper problem is that Wal Paget appears nowhere in any credit field, only inside a line of sales prose. Somebody who wants the illustrated edition has no searchable name to work from, and an artist who supplied a fair share of the appeal of an illustrated adventure is left effectively unfindable.
Shelving is the other practical problem here. The record sits under literature and fiction with a Drama and Plays tag attached, on a prose adventure novel containing no stage direction anywhere in it. A browser working through drama arrives at a siege story and leaves again; a browser hunting historical fiction pitched at younger readers, which is what this actually is, never reaches the page in the first place. Category placement is the difference between a title being discovered and a title merely existing.
One piece of arithmetic is worth doing. Two hundred seventy-three pages against eleven hours and forty minutes works out at roughly twenty-three pages an hour, comfortably slower than the pace at which trimming starts to show, so the unabridged claim holds up against the print metadata. That is a rare case of welded fields earning their keep. The written column, meanwhile, is empty. Whatever score sits at the top of this page arrived without a sentence of explanation attached to it, so the preview has to carry the entire decision by itself.
Households Reading Aloud Get More From the Formality
Recommend it to a listener who already enjoys nineteenth-century adventure and wants a long one, and to anybody working through the Hundred Years' War who would rather have it as a story than as a chronology. The period material is the draw: hostage politics, a guild seizing a capital, and the slow business of loyalty being tested by distance from the person you swore it to. Households that read aloud together will get more from it than solitary listeners, because the formal diction is easier to absorb when somebody can stop and gloss a word.
Wrong reader for this: anybody who came for the pictures, and anybody expecting the interiority of a modern historical novel. The copy's own framing tells you which century produced it. Also worth avoiding if you need to know exactly what you are buying before you commit, since nothing on this record settles it for you. Sample twenty minutes of dialogue, decide whether the White Hoods line matters to you, and buy the printed edition instead if the artwork was the point.
The Short Version
- Narration: Jim Hodges is credited alone on a file running close to twelve hours, so whatever you hear in the sample is what carries the whole distance.
- Themes: The Hundred Years' War, a hostage household inside a hostile city, loyalty tested at a distance, nineteenth-century adventure for younger readers.
- Mood: Formal and steady, with a siege moving underneath it.
- Verdict: A full unabridged reading of an 1896 adventure, worth buying once you understand the page is describing a hardback.
Good to Know
How long is the At Agincourt audiobook, and is this the complete text?
The recording runs eleven hours and forty minutes, and the description states twice that the edition is complete and unabridged. The print edition the same page describes carries 273 pages, which works out near twenty-three pages for every hour of audio, a pace consistent with a full reading rather than a trimmed one.
Does the audiobook include the illustrations the description advertises?
Pictures cannot travel into a recording, so the sentence about over twelve black and white illustrations by Wal Paget sits with the printed edition the copy was taken from. If the artwork is the reason you are here, buy the book. The artist is named in that sentence and in no credit field.
What does the White Hoods of Paris line at the top of the description mean?
It reads like a subtitle that never reached the title field. The White Hoods are the butchers' guild that seizes Paris during the story, so the phrase names the central episode. Searching for it will not bring you to this page, which matters if you are hunting one specific edition.
Is this a good pick for younger listeners?
The story follows a boy serving as page and bodyguard to a hostage household, which is squarely the readership this kind of adventure was built for. The obstacle is diction rather than content, since 1896 sentences run long and carry a great deal of rank and title. Confident listeners around eleven and up manage it.
