Dune
Book One in the Dune Chronicles

Wow! What an adventure! This is a brilliant read and a well laid out story, set on the desert planet 'Dune'. A place where the universe is battling to control the 'Spice' found on this wretched land. This is a story of corruption, control and universal domination between various races who will betray one another at the drop of the hat. Whoever pays the highest price get's the greatest army, or so they think. Baron Harkonnen thinks he has the new planet administrator, 'The Duke of Atreides', wrapped around his fat finger and so he does, but the Baron had not accounted for The Dukes prophesied son Paul. Paul is a long awaited production of the 'Bene-Jeseret' experiment, which has been in development for many generations. A Bene-Jeseret is born and raised through a selection process of the highest order and of the best training known. Once Paul Atreides comes of age, he is put through the terrible 'Jongebar' test which could cost him his life and he survives with unprecedented results. A brutal plot is afoot to take absolute control of 'The Spice' and The Atreides family line is destroyed, only Paul and his mother survive and go into hiding and become allied with the planets local natives. They will rise again, a most powerful army that sets the universe on its edge. It's a long trilogy and sometimes hard to follow, but certainly worth your time. I listened to the audiobook version of this (over 22 hours) and was a little disappointed with this, as the characters voices and narration changed constantly. This is the only reason I've given it a 4 star. I found that the main narrator sometimes played the individual characters, which is fine, but other times there were other people doing those same characters so there was no real consistency to the audio flow. I found this distracting because I was expecting a particular character voice to be heard and it would have been even more enjoyable if the production company got this one right. They should have stuck to either the single narrator, or the different character voices playing their parts throughout... one, or the other but definitely not both.