This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Manalive (1912) is G.K. Chesterton's exuberant philosophical mystery-novel, built as a two-part courtroom drama around the irrepressible Innocent Smith. When a great wind blows Smith into the shabby boarding-house of Beacon House — tumbling over the garden fence, carrying a revolver and a suitcase, and radiating a vitality that turns the whole household upside down — he re-marries his own wife, burgles his own house, and fills the lives of the five bored young inmates with courts, banners, garden revolutions and wild weddings. Part I, "The Enigmas of Innocent Smith," presents the four charges that will be brought against him; Part II, "The Explanations of Innocent Smith," is the trial itself — the Murder Charge (The Eye of Death), the Burglary Charge (The Two Curates), the Desertion Charge (The Round Road) and the Polygamy Charge (The Wild Weddings) — in which the prosecuting Dr. Cyrus Pym, the defending barrister Arthur Inglewood, the journalist Michael Moon, the cynical Moses Gould and the omniscient Dr. Herbert Warner piece together the paradox of a man accused of four crimes who is in fact the most innocent soul alive. Chesterton's answer to the pessimism of the age, Manalive is a detective story, a love story and a manifesto for sanity, culminating in Moon's whispered verdict: "We have been sitting with a ghost."
