COMING SOON: The Withdrawal Audiobook by Geoffrey Beevers

The most silkily voiced Master of them all brings his own novel to sinister life for Big Finish

Geoffrey Beevers’ fourth novel, The Withdrawal, was published earlier this year by Fantom Publishing. But now the actor, who played the Master in Doctor Who’s The Keeper of Traken, has voiced a new audiobook. The new version is set for release in December 2019. It’s the result of Beevers teaming up with his long time collaborators at Big Finish Productions.

Set two decades in the future, The Withdrawal provides the Doctor Who actor’s own twisted examination of the classic themes of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s a world where people are willingly connected every second of every day by their technology. And where the greatest phobia is privacy. To be blocked from social media is to be ‘unpersoned’ and the severest punishment society can impose. When one man is threatened with having his online identity withdrawn, he becomes trapped in a nightmare.

Describing the process of recording his own novel for audio, Geoffrey Beevers said “it was really fun to do, in some ways easier than getting to know an unfamiliar book from scratch, which you sometimes have to do at quite short notice as an actor. At least I knew well all the twists and turns of the story and what I meant to say! The most difficult part was to get a sense of how the characters would sound when they spoke, especially some of the minor characters.

“But it was very enjoyable to do, even though some of it is quite dark. I only hope the listeners will find it as enjoyable!”

The Withdrawal, written and narrated by Geoffrey Beevers, is available for pre-order now at £9.99 on download only, exclusively at the Big Finish web site.

The Withdrawal

It is 2048. Alec works for U-Chooz, the giant tech corporation that controls everything in a consumer society. But Alec is divorced and alone, and longs to trace his lost daughter. Threatened with the withdrawal of his identity, he is sucked into the dark inner world of the U-Chooz elite.