Cruel Crazy Beautiful World
A Novel
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Cruel Crazy Beautiful World
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Narrated by:
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Eugene H. Russell IV
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By:
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Troy Blacklaws
About this listen
Two characters navigate the post-apartheid South African landscape in this haunting story of the injustice that still simmers below the country’s surface. In Troy Blacklaws' ambitious novel, the lives of two African men run parallel, exposing the tensions that rumble at South Africa's post-apartheid core. Jerusalem is a young poet and student whose stubborn father will no longer pay for his rambling studies.
Half Jewish, half Muslim, Jerusalem is forced from Cape Town to a distant harbor village by his father, who believes a stint selling curios to tourists will right his wandering ways. Meanwhile, Jabulani loses his teaching job in Zimbabwe after mocking President Mugabe and must move south to start a new life. But his life across the border is tainted by the harsh truth that racism isn’t gone; it’s just taken another form. As the two men's lives merge, their stories reveal the paradoxes of the South African experience.
©2011 Troy Blacklaws (P)2013 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 264
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3 out of 5 stars
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4 out of 5 stars
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When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war.
-
5 out of 5 stars
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Astonishing
- By G. Robinson on 06-27-04
By: Alexandra Fuller
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Beatlebone
- By: Kevin Barry
- Narrated by: Kevin Barry
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Story4 out of 5 stars 72
It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought nine years prior. Leaving behind domesticity, his approaching 40s, his inability to create, and his memories of his parents, he sets off to find calm in the comfortable silence of isolation. But when he puts himself in the hands of a shape-shifting driver full of Irish charm and dark whimsy, what ensues can only be termed a magical mystery tour.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Nooooo way
- By James on 11-17-15
By: Kevin Barry
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Blackbirds
- Miriam Black, Book 1
- By: Chuck Wendig
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 444
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 403
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Story4 out of 5 stars 400
Miriam Black knows when you will die. Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days he will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. No matter what she does, she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not for the faint of heart or kids but exciting
- By Steph on 04-07-14
By: Chuck Wendig
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 147
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 129
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Story4 out of 5 stars 130
At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
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Gods of Howl Mountain
- By: Taylor Brown
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 225
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 202
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 202
In Gods of Howl Mountain, award-winning author Taylor Brown explores a world of folk healers, whiskey-runners, and dark family secrets in the high country of 1950s North Carolina. Bootlegger Rory Docherty has returned home to the fabled mountain of his childhood - a misty wilderness that holds its secrets close and keeps the outside world at gunpoint. Slowed by a wooden leg and haunted by memories of the Korean War, Rory runs bootleg whiskey for a powerful mountain clan in a retro-fitted 1940 Ford coupe.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Appalatia Noir
- By meanwhile on 09-18-18
By: Taylor Brown
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The Incarnations
- A Novel
- By: Susan Barker
- Narrated by: Timo Chen, Joy Osmanski
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 177
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 162
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Story4 out of 5 stars 162
Who are you? You must be wondering. I am your soul mate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of 16 million in search of you. So begins the first letter that falls into Wang's lap as he flips down the visor in his taxi. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of Wang's previous lives - from escaping a marriage to a spirit bride to being a slave on the run from Genghis Khan to living as a fisherman during the Opium Wars and being a teenager on the Red Guard during the cultural revolution.
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3 out of 5 stars
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What was that you said?
- By cecil reniche-smith on 08-29-15
By: Susan Barker
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Something Wicked This Way Comes
- By: Ray Bradbury
- Narrated by: Christian Rummel
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6,400
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5,797
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5,802
A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope's shrill siren song beckons to all with a seductive promise of dreams and youth regained. In this season of dying, Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show has come to Green Town, Illinois, to destroy every life touched by its strange and sinister mystery.
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5 out of 5 stars
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It's so creepy
- By Midwestbonsai on 11-14-14
By: Ray Bradbury
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Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,100
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 950
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Story4 out of 5 stars 939
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
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4 out of 5 stars
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"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
- An African Childhood
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 794
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 790
Alexandra Fuller tells the idiosyncratic story of her life growing up white in rural Rhodesia as it was becoming Zimbabwe. The daughter of hardworking, yet strikingly unconventional English-bred immigrants, Alexandra arrives in Africa at the tender age of two. She moves through life with a hardy resilience, even as a bloody war approaches. Narrator Lisette Lecat reads this remarkable memoir of a family clinging to a harsh landscape and the dying tenets of colonialism.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An African Childhood of Harrowing Proportions
- By Sara on 10-12-15
By: Alexandra Fuller
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Radiance
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Heath Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 141
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 129
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 130
Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Unexpected and tons of fun
- By Kate on 11-17-15
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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
- By: Monique Roffey
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 95
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4 out of 5 stars 87
A beautifully written, unforgettable novel of a troubled marriage, set against the lush landscape and political turmoil of Trinidad. Monique Roffey's Orange Prize-shortlisted novel is a gripping portrait of post-colonialism that stands among great works by Caribbean writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Andrea Levy. When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England, George is immediately seduced by the beguiling island, while Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill-at-ease.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Disappointing.
- By Crystal on 10-31-12
By: Monique Roffey
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Church of Marvels
- A Novel
- By: Leslie Parry
- Narrated by: Denice Stradling
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 127
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 112
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Story4 out of 5 stars 114
New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.
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5 out of 5 stars
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If Dickens needed a NY location for a story..
- By Sandi from Oregon on 05-13-15
By: Leslie Parry
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The River of Kings
- By: Taylor Brown
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 84
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 75
The Altamaha River, Georgia's "Little Amazon", is one of the last truly wild places in America. Crossed by roads only five times in its 137 miles, the blackwater river is home to 1,000-year-old virgin cypresses, direct descendants of 18th-century Highland warriors, and a staggering array of rare and endangered species. The Altamaha is even rumored to harbor its own river monster, as well as traces of the oldest European fort in North America.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Pay careful attention to the brothers' relationship
- By Pam Horn on 09-25-17
By: Taylor Brown
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 100
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4 out of 5 stars 90
Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Island of a Thousand Mirrors
- By: Nayomi Munaweera
- Narrated by: Priya Ayyar
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 101
Yasodhara tells the story of her own Sinhala family, rich in love, with everything they could ask for. As a child in idyllic Colombo, social hierarchies, their parents’ ambitions, teenage love shape Yasodhara and her siblings’ lives, and, subtly, the differences between Tamil and Sinhala people; but the peace is shattered by the tragedies of war. Yasodhara's family escapes to Los Angeles. But Yasodhara's life has already become intertwined with a young Tamil girl's.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Pronunciation
- By Mahidevran on 04-07-18
By: Nayomi Munaweera