The Italian

Young nobleman Vincentio di Vivaldi falls in love with the mysterious Ellena, and his aristocratic mother enlists her confessor, the monk Schedoni, to separate them by any means necessary. Schedoni is a former Inquisitor with a talent for cruelty and a genius for moral justification, and his methods escalate from social pressure to abduction to contemplated murder. Ann Radcliffe's 1796 Gothic novel is the genre's most fully realized portrait of religious corruption and institutional evil.

Georgina Sutton narrates with the atmospheric control that Gothic fiction requires, building dread through the accumulation of detail rather than shock. Her voice gives the Italian setting its quality of beautiful menace, and she handles Schedoni's scenes with an appropriate weight of cold authority. The audiobook suits Radcliffe's long approach to horror, her tendency to delay revelation across many chapters of foreboding, because Sutton's sustained performance makes the delay feel suspenseful rather than slow.