Growing Goats and Girls
Living the Good Life on a Cornish Farm - ESCAPISM AT ITS LOVELIEST
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Growing Goats and Girls
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Narrated by:
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Olivia Scarlett-Watts
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By:
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Rosanne Hodin
About this listen
Ever dream of packing up and escaping to a simpler life on the land, just the Cornish landscape and a few cows and goats rising up to greet you each day?
When Rosanne and her husband left city life for the Cornwall idyll they knew little of farming, the seasons and milking, but over time they found their way, rising to each new challenge and embracing all that the land gave them.
Growing Goats and Girls lovingly and invitingly charts the rural, hardworking and joyfully haphazard lives of Rosanne and her husband as they escape London to live off the land.
In their tumbled-down farmhouse in Cornwall, they learn to rear goats, chickens, cows, bees - and two children - get to grips with unruly machinery and cantankerous farmers and chart the changing seasons in glorious countryside over 30 years.
Heart-warming and uplifting in its celebration of the simple things, this earthy portrait of life on the land taps in to our collective imagination. After all, who hasn't dreamed of new beginnings, escaping into nature and living more simply.
Growing Goats and Girls reminds us to appreciate the fleeting, timeless moments of beauty, nature and the simple comforts of family life.
©2020 Rosanne Hodin (P)2020 Hodder & Stoughton LtdListeners also enjoyed...
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 209
Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Meh
- By dpenney on 12-22-16
By: Michael Perry
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Dirty Chick
- Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer
- By: Antonia Murphy
- Narrated by: Antonia Murphy
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,098
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,005
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,007
One month into our stay, we'd managed to dispatch most of our charges. We executed the chickens. One of the cats disappeared, clearly disgusted with our urban ways. And Lucky [the cow] was escaping almost daily. It seemed we didn't have much of a talent for farming. And we still had eleven months to go." Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliché, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Loved it!
- By kara-karina on 02-11-15
By: Antonia Murphy
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Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English
- By: Natasha Solomons
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4 out of 5 stars 82
At the start of World War II, Jack and Sadie Rosenblum flee Berlin for London with their baby daughter, Elizabeth. Upon arrival, Jack receives a pamphlet from the German Jewish Aid Committee on how to act like a proper Englishman. He follows it to the letter -Saville Row suits, the BBC, trips to Covent Garden, a Jaguar - and it works like a charm. The Rosenblums settle into a prosperous new life.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Endearing
- By Emily on 09-09-11
By: Natasha Solomons
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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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Rascal
- By: Sterling North
- Narrated by: Ed Sala
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 226
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 185
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 185
In 1918 Wisconsin, 11-year-old Sterling North has an almost perfect life. He keeps skunks in the backyard, goes everywhere with his enormous Saint Bernard, and is building a canoe in the living room. The only trouble is life gets a little lonely for him and his father since his mother died. While scouting around the woods one afternoon, he discovers an abandoned, month-old raccoon. Afraid the kit will die on its own, he takes it home to join his menagerie.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very Enjoyable
- By Tad on 02-13-10
By: Sterling North
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Farm City
- The Education of an Urban Farmer
- By: Novella Carpenter
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 387
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 282
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Story4 out of 5 stars 289
Novella Carpenter loves cities - the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Hmmm.
- By THoward on 09-30-09
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Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 709
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 607
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 604
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
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Nothing with Strings
- NPR's Beloved Holiday Stories
- By: Bailey White
- Narrated by: Lorna Raver
- Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 44
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
The mundane and the miraculous stand side by side in these sketches and stories of Southern small-time life by the author of Quite a Year for Plums.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A real jewel.
- By Mary on 12-31-08
By: Bailey White
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Miracles on Maple Hill
- By: Virginia Sorensen
- Narrated by: Cynthia Bishop, the Full Cast Family
- Length: 4 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 232
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 189
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 187
A father's wounded heart. A mother's patient love. An eager boy, an impetuous girl, and, above all, the healing power of nature. These are the classic ingredients that fill Virginia Sorensen's Newbery Award-winning novel with a tender power and lift it to classic status.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful, uplifting book for all ages
- By carmela on 01-09-08
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Medieval Woman
- Village Life in the Middle Ages
- By: Ann Baer
- Narrated by: Sarah Whitehouse
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 230
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 197
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 199
A history of peasants in the Middle Ages, the story takes the listener into the life of Marion, the carpenter's wife, and her extended family as they struggle to survive through hardship, featuring a year in their lives at the mercy of the weather and the Lord of the Manor. Existing without soap, paper or glass and only with the most basic of tools, we learn how they survive starvation, sickness, fire and natural disaster in their home on the edge of the Weald.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Listen to this on a cold dark night.
- By V on 03-07-19
By: Ann Baer
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The Bucolic Plague
- How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir
- By: Josh Kilmer-Purcell
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 218
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 192
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 192
A happy series of accidents and a doughnut-laden escape upstate take Josh Kilmer-Purcell and his partner, Brent Ridge, to the doorstep of the magnificent (and fabulously for sale) Beekman Mansion. And so begins their transformation from uptight urbanites into the 200-year-old-mansion-owning Beekman Boys. Suddenly Josh---a full-time New Yorker with a successful advertising career---and Brent find themselves weekend farmers, surrounded by nature's bounty and an eclectic cast.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Selling your dream and name dropping
- By Mark on 09-13-12
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Elmet
- By: Fiona Mozley
- Narrated by: Gareth Bennett Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 538
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 500
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Story4 out of 5 stars 499
In this atmospheric and profoundly moving debut, Cathy and Daniel live with their father, John, in the remote woods of Yorkshire, in a house the three of them built themselves. John is a gentle brute of a man, a former enforcer who fights for money when he has to, but who otherwise just wants to be left alone to raise his children. When a local landowner shows up on their doorstep, their precarious existence is threatened, and a series of actions is set in motion that can only end in violence.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Strains credibility
- By DM on 01-06-18
By: Fiona Mozley
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The Darling Buds of May
- The Larkin Novels, Volume 1
- By: H. E. Bates
- Narrated by: Philip Franks
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
When Cedric Charlton, an unsuspecting tax inspector, arrives at the door of the Pop Larkin farm, he soon forgets the purpose of his visit: The fun-loving Ma and Pop Larkin distract him at every turn with strawberries, cream, alcohol, and their attractive young daughter, Mariette. Well known by the popular TV series starring David Jason and Catherine Zeta-Jones, The Darling Buds of May is the quintessential feel-good country romp.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Even better read aloud
- By Amazon Customer on 04-05-20
By: H. E. Bates
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Small Things Like These
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aidan Kelly
- Length: 1 hr and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,673
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1,514
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,512
It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man, faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery that forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Charming and Inspiring
- By David P on 09-05-22
By: Claire Keegan
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Enchanted Glass
- By: Diana Wynne Jones
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 352
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 298
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 299
The mysterious Stalkers show up at almost the same instant 12-year-old Aiden Cain’s grandmother dies. Following his grandmother’s instructions, Aiden decides to seek out a powerful sorcerer at Melstone House. Yet when he arrives, he discovers the man died a year earlier. Melstone House now belongs to the sorcerer’s adult grandson Andrew, who agrees to help Aiden with the Stalker problem.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Magic and Ordinary Life
- By Gentle Reader Jill on 01-24-11
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Out Stealing Horses
- By: Per Petterson
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 499
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 332
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Story4 out of 5 stars 337
Multiple award-winning author Per Petterson delivers an eloquent, meditative novel. 67-year-old Trond Sander lives secluded in a far corner of Norway. Casting his mind back to 1948, he recalls a horse-stealing prank with his best friend that turned tragic and changed his life forever.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Quiet and powerful
- By KP on 01-24-10
By: Per Petterson