Matters of Chance

A Novel

By: Gail Albert

Narrated by: Suehyla El'Attar

"I am thirty-four years old, married, a professor of neurobiology; I have two sons, aged nine and seven. I grew up in Brownsville and I left it behind, and I was diagnosed as having cancer in January. I know that these facts are connected; I have yet to understand how."

Mona's perfect world is shattered by sudden and serious illness - leaving her searching her past for answers. Fate has led her from a tough Brooklyn girlhood to a happy marriage with a wonderful man, but what has she forgotten along the way? In this classic New York novel of the 1980s, as Mona struggles to understand her own life story, she uncovers the shocking memory of a murder and traces the shape of her own mortality.

This stunning work was a finalist for the National Book Award for First Novel; now, its brilliant, ambitious exploration of an unfinished life is about to be discovered by a new generation of listeners.

©1982 Gail Albert (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Kept me up way past my bedtime to finish listening

Yup, this novel kept me up past midnight in order to finish the last two hours of listening (after having been drawn in from the very beginning a couple of days earlier), and the ending did not disappoint.
There are several remarkable aspects to this novel/audiobook, not in order of importance:
It was both a fun time-travel back into the 80s - I had not thought of my beloved waterbed in a long, long time - and surprisingly fresh, hard to believe the author wrote this story all these decades ago.
It reads like a fictional memoir, which is a common form of narrative these days but was not common at all back then.
The language is beautiful, as is the arc of the story. Feels like the chapters are made up of artful vignettes that, as the novel progresses, flow into each other in an almost dreamy way.
The narrator is excellent! Her voices/inflections bring the poignant prose even more to life. A couple of mispronunciations of the Hebrew in no way diminished my enthusiastic five star rating for the narrator's performance!
Funny at times, deep and nuanced always, the "slice of life" storytelling that is both entertaining and a kind of empathy gym, allowing us insight into how history and culture and a confluence of circumstances create distinct characters - villains and heroes/heroines and unsung folks in between - while deepening our sense of common humanity.
Highly recommended!

Best novel I ever read!

Do not miss this great book! A beautiful story of love, courage and survival in difficult times.