Keep the Aspidistra Flying
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Narrated by:
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Richard E. Grant
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By:
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George Orwell
About this listen
Gordon Comstock loathes dull, middle-class respectability and worship of money. He gives up a 'good job' in advertising to work part-time in a bookshop, giving him more time to write. But he slides instead into a self-induced poverty that destroys his creativity and his spirit. Only Rosemary, ever-faithful Rosemary, has the strength to challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life. Through the character of Gordon Comstock, Orwell reveals his own disaffection with the society he once himself renounced.
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George Orwell transformed literature with his piercing social commentary and allegorical style. His works have become so entrenched in popular culture that the term "Orwellian" is used to describe totalitarian and authoritarian societies. Orwell also wrote nonfiction books and essays that similarly express his gift for satire and controversial views on government. Throughout his writing career, he never feared tackling challenging topics, no matter how subversive.
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Story
Of Human Bondage is one of the greatest novels of modern times, and it is certainly Maugham's greatest achievement. It was published in 1914, when Maugham was at the height of his creative powers. The story concerns Philip Carey, afflicted at birth with a club foot, and his passionate search for truth in a cruel world. We follow his growth to manhood, his educational progress, his first loves, and the wrenching tragedies and disappointments that life has in store for him. In some of the finest prose of the 20th century, Maugham has presented us with the timeless story of one man's search for the meaning of life.
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Greatly Unsettling
- By Anonymous User on 10-04-14
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The Keys to the Street
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
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Mystery with humor and insight
- By Anonymous User on 10-02-12
By: Ruth Rendell
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The Forsyte Chronicles, Vol. 3: End of the Chapter
- By: John Galsworthy
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 30 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The third volume of this gripping family saga, End of the Chapter, shifts to the Cherrells - cousins of the Forsytes by marriage. Young Dinny Cherrell in particular cherishes their ancestral home, Condaford Grange, which represents stability in a rapidly changing world. Through his depiction of the lives and loves of this family, Galsworthy throws a brilliant spotlight on the social and political upheavals of the 1930s.
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Very enjoyable
- By Anonymous User on 11-28-22
By: John Galsworthy
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A Change of Climate
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Sandra Duncan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
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Beautifully written
- By Anonymous User on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
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I Capture the Castle
- By: Dodie Smith
- Narrated by: Jenny Agutter
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this coming of age story, Dodie Smith introduces the visionary and eccentric character of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. The youngest daughter in a family of impoverished artists, it is her imagination and writing that takes us away from the ramshackle old English castle where they live, and towards an intriguing tale of husband-hunting and light-hearted sibling rivalry.
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Well, that was a surprise
- By Anonymous User on 12-16-13
By: Dodie Smith
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Herzog
- By: Saul Bellow
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 15 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.
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Grows Within You
- By Anonymous User on 08-06-11
By: Saul Bellow
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Hunger
- A Novel
- By: Knut Hamsun
- Narrated by: Kevin Foley
- Length: 6 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Knut Hamsun's Hunger, first published in 1890 and hailed as the literary beginning of the 20th century, is a masterpiece of psychologically driven fiction. The story of a struggling artist living on the edge of starvation, the novel portrays the unnamed first-person narrator's descent into paranoia, despair, and madness as hunger overtakes him. As the protagonist loses his grip on reality, Hamsun brilliantly portrays the disturbing and irrational recesses of the human mind through increasingly disjointed and urgent prose.
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Book quite good; wrong narrator
- By Anonymous User on 05-05-11
By: Knut Hamsun
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Three Comrades
- By: Erich Maria Remarque, Arthur Wesley Wheen - translator
- Narrated by: Michael Braun
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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The year is 1928. On the outskirts of a large German city, three young men are earning a thin and precarious living. Fully armed young storm troopers swagger in the streets. Restlessness, poverty, and violence are everywhere. For these three, friendship is the only refuge from the chaos around them. Then the youngest of them falls in love and brings into the group a young woman who will become a comrade as well, as they are all tested in ways they can have never imagined.
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Love and friendship in a dying world.
- By Anonymous User on 03-18-19
By: Erich Maria Remarque, and others
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
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A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Anonymous User on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Anonymous User on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Coming up for Air
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Richard Brown
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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George Bowling, an insurance salesman, hits middle age and feels impelled to “come up for air” from his life of quiet desperation. With seventeen pounds he has won at a race, he steals a vacation from his wife and family and pays a visit to Lower Binfield, the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. But the pool is gone, Lower Binfield has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of Bowling’s holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.
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Orwell Flirts and Fishes w/ Nostalgia & Modernity.
- By Anonymous User on 07-10-12
By: George Orwell
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Down and Out in Paris and London
- By: George Orwell
- Narrated by: Frederick Davidson
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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