Mother of All Pigs
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Mother of All Pigs
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Narrated by:
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Lameece Issaq
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By:
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Malu Halasa
About this listen
The Sabas family lives in a small Jordanian town that for centuries has been descended upon by all manner of invader, the latest a scourge of disconcerting Evangelical tourists. The border town relies on a blackmarket trade of clothes, trinkets, and appliances - the quality of which depends entirely on who’s fighting - but the conflict in nearby Syria has the place even more on edge than usual.
Meanwhile, the Sabas home is ruled by women - Mother Fadhma, Laila, Samira, and now, Muna, a niece visiting from America for the first time - and it is brimming with regrets and desires. Clandestine pasts in love, politics, even espionage, threaten the delicate balance of order in the household, as generations clash. The family’s ostensible patriarch - Laila’s husband Hussein - enjoys no such secrets, not in his family or in town, where Hussein is known as the Levant’s only pig butcher, dealing in chops, sausages, and hams, much to the chagrin of his observant neighbors.
When a long-lost soldier from Hussein's military past arrives, the Sabas clan must decide whether to protect or expose him, bringing long-simmering rivalries and injustices to the surface. Enchanting and fearless, Halasa's prose intertwines the lives of three generations of women as they navigate the often stifling, sometimes absurd realities of everyday life in the Middle East.
©2017 Malu Halasa (P)2018 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Honor
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno, Piter Marik
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 117
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 98
An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London. Internationally best-selling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Complex but Compelling
- By Cariola on 04-14-13
By: Elif Shafak
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 72
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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The Bastard of Istanbul
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 447
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 305
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Story4 out of 5 stars 307
In her second novel written in English, Elif Shafak confronts her country's violent past in a vivid and colorful tale set in both Turkey and the United States. At its center is the "bastard" of the title, Asya, a 19-year-old woman who loves Johnny Cash and the French Existentialists, and the four sisters of the Kazanci family who all live together in an extended household in Istanbul.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A tender gift from far away
- By Barbara on 11-07-07
By: Elif Shafak
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Guests of the Sheik
- An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
- By: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 55
A delightful, well-written, and vastly informative ethnographic study, this is an account of Elizabeth Warnock Fernea's two-year stay in a tiny rural village in Iraq, where she assumed the dress and sheltered life of a harem woman. This volume gives a unique insight into a part of the Midddle Eastern life seldom seen by the West.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Unforgettable
- By Avalon on 01-05-18
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 247
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 212
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 209
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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5 out of 5 stars
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 378
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 128
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Story4 out of 5 stars 133
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
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Guernica
- A Novel
- By: Dave Boling
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 13 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 126
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
Calling to mind such timeless war-and-love classics as Corelli's Mandolin and The English Patient, Guernica is a transporting novel that thrums with the power of storytelling and is peopled with characters driven by grit and heart.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Guernica a good historical novel
- By ARLEENE on 04-26-11
By: Dave Boling
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Dreamers of the Day
- A Novel
- By: Mary Doria Russell
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 188
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Story4 out of 5 stars 139
A 40-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as an historic Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinions - and a small, noisy dachshund named Rosie - enters into the company of the historic luminaries.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Little Big Woman
- By W.Denis on 10-02-08
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The Orphan Keeper
- By: Camron Wright
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,074
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2,757
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Story5 out of 5 stars 2,753
Seven-year-old Chellamuthu's life - and his destiny - is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in Southern India and sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. His family is desperate to find him, and Chellamuthu anxiously tells the Indian orphanage that he is not an orphan, he has a mother who loves him. But he is told not to worry, he will soon be adopted by a loving family in America.
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5 out of 5 stars
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5 Star Worthy
- By Kari on 10-26-16
By: Camron Wright
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Green City in the Sun
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Edie Tusor
- Length: 27 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 38
In 1917 Dr. Grace Treverton arrives in Kenya determined to bring modern medicine to the African natives. Her brother, Sir Valentine Treverton, has his own dream for the British protectorate: to establish an agricultural empire to rival any in England. The aspirations of the wealthy Trevertons collide with those of the Mathenge tribe, an African family that has lived on the land for years. Grace soon finds a deadly rival in Mama Wachera, an African medicine woman who fights to maintain native traditions against the encroaching whites.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautifully written
- By nancy wanty on 12-18-23
By: Barbara Wood
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One Amazing Thing
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Purva Bedi, Soneela Nankani, Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 128
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 102
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Story4 out of 5 stars 100
Winner of a Pushcart Prize for poetry and an American Book Award for her short stories, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores themes of women, immigration, and her vibrant Indian culture to great effect. Divakaruni expands on these ideas in One Amazing Thing, a project long in the making and full of electric prose.
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3 out of 5 stars
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An ok way to kill some time
- By R.Reader on 11-07-12
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The Blue Between Sky and Water
- By: Susan Abulhawa
- Narrated by: Jennifer Woodward
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 71
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 71
It is 1947, and Beit Daras, a quiet village in Palestine surrounded by olive groves, is home to the Baraka family. Eldest daughter Nazmiyeh looks after her widowed mother, prone to wandering and strange outbursts, while her brother, Mamdouh, tends to the village bees. Their younger sister, Mariam, with her striking mismatched eyes, spends her days talking to imaginary friends and writing.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Horrible pronunciation
- By Debra Sabah Press on 11-08-18
By: Susan Abulhawa
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 566
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 489
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Story5 out of 5 stars 485
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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The Island
- By: Victoria Hislop
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 88
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
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Story5 out of 5 stars 82
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding plans a trip to her mother's childhood home in Plaka, Greece hoping to unravel Sofia's hidden past. Given a letter to take to Sofia's old friend, Fotini, Alexis is promised that through Fotini, she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the deserted island of Spinalonga—Greece's former leper colony. Fotini reveals the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war, and passion.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Will listen to it again someday
- By RN on 01-07-23
By: Victoria Hislop
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Tears of the Desert
- A Memoir of Survival in Darfur
- By: Halima Bashir, Damien Lewis
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 67
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Story5 out of 5 stars 68
Halima Bashir was born into the Zaghawa tribe, whose customs have remained unchanged for centuries, in the remote western deserts of Sudan in the region of South Darfur. Halima's father named his daughter after the traditional medicine woman of the village, and she grew up in a happy and close-knit childhood environment. Her father became a wealthy man by his tribe's standards, so he could afford to send Halima to school and university. Halima went on to study medicine, and at 24 she returned to her tribe and began practicing as their first ever qualified doctor.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A story that takes you there
- By Justicepirate on 05-22-17
By: Halima Bashir, and others
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House of Stone
- A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East
- By: Anthony Shadid
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 90
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 80
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Story4 out of 5 stars 78
When Anthony Shadid—one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya as the region erupted—was freed, he went home, not to Boston, Beirut, or Oklahoma, where he was raised by his Lebanese American family, but to an ancient estate built by his great-grandfather, a place filled with memories of a lost era when the Middle East was a world of grace, grandeur, and unexpected departures.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Bit depressing
- By Astrid Dahl on 03-17-12
By: Anthony Shadid