Constellations
Reflections from Life
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Constellations
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Narrated by:
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Sinéad Gleeson
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By:
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Sinéad Gleeson
About this listen
Number one Irish best seller!
For fans of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison, Sinéad Gleeson's essays chronicle—in crystalline, tender, powerful prose—life in a body as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood, and love of all kinds.
"I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles."
We treat the body as an afterthought, until it no longer can be. Until the pain or the pleasure is too great. Sinéad Gleeson's life has been marked by terrible illness, including leukemia and debilitating arthritis. As a child, she bathed in the springs of Lourdes, ever hopeful that her body would cooperate, ever looking forward to the day when she could take her body for granted.
But just as she turns inward to explore her own pain, and then the marvel of recovery, and then the arrival of her greatest joys—falling in love, becoming a mother—she turns her gaze outward. She delves into history, art, literature, and music, plotting the intimate experience of life in a women's body across a wide-ranging map.
From Nick Cave to Taylor Swift, Botticelli to Frida Kahlo, Louisa May Alcott to Lucy Grealy, Constellations is an investigation into the different ways of seeing, both uniquely personal and universal in its resonances.
In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, Gleeson explores—in her own spirited, generous voice—the fierceness of being alive. She has written "a book [that] every woman should read" (Eimear McBride).
©2019 Sinéad Gleeson (P)2020 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing CompanyListeners also enjoyed...
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- Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 193
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 166
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 165
You get ready to die the way you get ready for a trip. Start by realizing you don't know the way. Listen to a few travel guides. Study the language, look at maps, gather equipment. Let yourself imagine what it will be like. Pack your bags. This book is one of those travel guides - a guide to preparing for your own death and the deaths of people close to you. The fact of death is hard to believe. Sallie Tisdale explores our fears and all the ways death and talking about death make us uncomfortable - but she also explores its intimacies and joys.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I thought I had more time...
- By Alyssa on 09-09-19
By: Sallie Tisdale
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Smile
- The Story of a Face
- By: Sarah Ruhl
- Narrated by: Sarah Ruhl
- Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 111
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 98
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 98
With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell’s palsy patients experience a full recovery—like Ruhl’s own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Synkinesis: I am there
- By Elizabeth Principi on 11-04-21
By: Sarah Ruhl
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Little Matches
- A Memoir of Finding Light in the Dark
- By: Maryanne O'Hara
- Narrated by: Maryanne O'Hara
- Length: 9 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story5 out of 5 stars 34
When their only child was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (CF) at the age of two, Maryanne O'Hara and her husband were told that Caitlin could live a long life or be dead in a matter of months. Thirty-one years later, Caitlin lost her battle with this devastating disease following an excruciating two-year wait on the transplant list and a last-minute race to locate a pair of healthy lungs. The sudden spiral of events left Maryanne in an existential crisis, searching to find an answer to the eternal question: Why we are here?
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5 out of 5 stars
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I don't know who needs to read it...
- By H. Hill on 04-18-23
By: Maryanne O'Hara
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- The Path to a Better Way of Death
- By: Katy Butler
- Narrated by: Katy Butler
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 157
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 142
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 138
Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving, and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and non - life threatening heart arrhythmia, doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker.
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2 out of 5 stars
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A better way to narrate a book about death?
- By MAUREEN on 10-21-13
By: Katy Butler
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Finding Chika
- A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family
- By: Mitch Albom
- Narrated by: Mitch Albom
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 2,048
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,778
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Story5 out of 5 stars 1,770
Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince. With no children of their own, the 40-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says "no one in Haiti can help you with."
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5 out of 5 stars
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BUY READ AND RECOMMEND THIS BOOK
- By The Birds. on 11-05-19
By: Mitch Albom
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When Breath Becomes Air
- By: Paul Kalanithi, Abraham Verghese - foreword
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra, Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29,269
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 25,697
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 25,631
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Phenomenal book!
- By A. Potter on 01-16-16
By: Paul Kalanithi, and others
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Native Country of the Heart
- A Memoir
- By: Cherríe Moraga
- Narrated by: Cherríe Moraga
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story5 out of 5 stars 52
Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a must read for all chicanx
- By Rachel Barnett on 04-28-19
By: Cherríe Moraga
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Healing Hearts
- A Memoir of a Female Heart Surgeon
- By: Kathy Magliato
- Narrated by: Renée Raudman
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
Dr. Kathy Magliato is one of fewer than a dozen female heart surgeons practicing in the world today. She is also a member of an even more exclusive group - those surgeons who perform heart transplants. Healing Hearts is the story of the making of a surgeon who also calls herself a wife and mother.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Healing Hearts
- By Jean on 01-14-12
By: Kathy Magliato
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Marrow
- A Love Story
- By: Elizabeth Lesser
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Lesser, Sally Field
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 231
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 212
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 212
A mesmerizing and courageous memoir: the story of two sisters uncovering the depth of their love through the life-and-death experience of a bone marrow transplant. Throughout her life Elizabeth Lesser has sought understanding about what it means to be true to yourself and, at the same time, truly connected to the ones you love. But when her sister, Maggie, needs a bone marrow transplant to save her life, and Lesser learns that she is the perfect match, she faces a far more immediate and complex question about what it really means to love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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“ Love came first “
- By marie on 03-26-18
By: Elizabeth Lesser
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Ghostbelly
- By: Elizabeth Heineman
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 38
Ghostbelly is Elizabeth Heineman’s personal account of a home birth that goes tragically wrong—ending in a stillbirth—and the harrowing process of grief and questioning that follows. It’s also Heineman’s unexpected tale of the loss of a newborn: before burial, she brings the baby home for overnight stays.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Healing
- By ngsquared on 04-17-23
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The Undying
- Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care
- By: Anne Boyer
- Narrated by: Amy Finegan
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4 out of 5 stars 49
A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Provocative and moving
- By C. FREEMAN on 05-13-20
By: Anne Boyer
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This Close to Happy
- A Reckoning with Depression
- By: Daphne Merkin
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 67
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4 out of 5 stars 59
This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I should be the last person to recommend this book
- By Mariaposa on 03-04-17
By: Daphne Merkin
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The Heart
- By: Maylis de Kerangal, Sam Taylor - translator
- Narrated by: Steven Jay Cohen
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4 out of 5 stars 44
The Heart takes place over the 24 hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose, it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved as they navigate decisions of life and death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wow! What a story!
- By Jan on 02-27-20
By: Maylis de Kerangal, and others
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All of This
- A Memoir of Death and Desire
- By: Rebecca Woolf
- Narrated by: Rebecca Woolf
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 184
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 168
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 168
After years of struggling in a tumultuous marriage, writer Rebecca Woolf was finally ready to leave her husband. Two weeks after telling him she wanted a divorce, he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. Four months later, at the age of forty-four, he died. In All of This, Woolf chronicles the months before her husband’s death—and her rebirth after he was gone. With rigorous honesty and incredible awareness, she reflects on the end of her marriage: how her husband’s illness finally gave her the space to make peace with his humanity and her own.
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5 out of 5 stars
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excellentt!
- By S. DAWN HANSCOM on 11-26-22
By: Rebecca Woolf
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On Division
- A Novel
- By: Goldie Goldbloom
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 57
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, just a block or two up from the East River on Division Avenue, Surie Eckstein is soon to be a great-grandmother. Her 10 children range in age from 13 to 39. Her in-laws, postwar immigrants from Romania, live on the first floor of their house. Her daughter Tzila Ruchel lives on the second. She and Yidel, a scribe in such demand that he makes only a few Torah scrolls a year, live on the third. Wed when Surie was 16, they have a happy marriage and a full life, and, at the ages of 57 and 62, they are looking forward to some quiet time together.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A great book
- By Sab on 04-24-20
By: Goldie Goldbloom
What listeners say about Constellations
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sharif
- 07-25-20
Best Memoir I've Ever Read!
This is one of the most intellectually imaginative and daring and emotionally impactful book of essays I've ever read. No wonder it was a bestseller in Ireland. I'll re-listen to this audiobook many times in my lifetime. It is that good.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 05-09-24
Beautiful portrayal of a certain kind of female, Irish experience
Loved this book, beautifully written and gave a real sense of ireland in the 1980s/90s and beyond. I loved the pick and mix of the chapters and her portrayal of bodily experiences, illness, birth, her aunt’s death and the small subjective reflections of interactions and memories. I will buy the hard copy too.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- NK Turoff
- 12-09-23
Extraordinary
Beautifully written. Fierce and smart and deeply moving
one of the best books I've listened to all year.
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