The Don't Touch Garden
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The Don't Touch Garden
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Narrated by:
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Kate Foley
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By:
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Kate Foley
About this listen
"Mirror, mirror on the wall," the old joke says. "I am my mother after all." But which? Born in 1938 and adopted soon after, Kate Foley grew up in London during WWII. The Don't Touch Garden explores what it is to be adopted, both for the child and the adoptive parents, through a wide range of poetic styles and complex emotions. An absorbing account of the legacy of being an adopted child. Forthright and tender, this moving sequence reflects Foley's unflinching gaze into the mirror in a sometimes excoriating attempt to discern traces of her belonging and to make peace with the past. Joy Howard, poet, publisher and former fostering services manager.
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Story4 out of 5 stars 270
Koschei the Deathless is to Russian folklore what devils or wicked witches are to Western European culture: a menacing, evil figure; the villain of countless stories that have been passed on through story and text for generations. But Koschei has never before been seen through the eyes of Catherynne Valente, whose modernized and transformed take on the legend brings the action to modern times, spanning many of the great developments of Russian history in the 20th century.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My Favorite Fantasy Book of the Year
- By Robert on 12-29-13
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Arcadia
- By: Lauren Groff
- Narrated by: Andrew Garman
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 375
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 325
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Story4 out of 5 stars 323
Lauren Groff’s acclaimed debut novel The Monsters of Templeton was short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Arcadia opens in the late 1960s with a group of young idealists forming a commune in western New York State. Into this group is born Bit, who grows into a quiet, distant man. Over the course of 50 years, Bit witnesses the utopia crumble and the world change in unimaginable ways.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Luscious prose, intimate and realistic
- By Kathleen on 03-22-12
By: Lauren Groff
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Palimpsest
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Aasne Vigesaa
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 165
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 137
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Story4 out of 5 stars 134
Between life and death, dreaming and waking, at the train stop beyond the end of the world is the city of Palimpsest. To get there is a miracle, a mystery, a gift, and a curse - a voyage permitted only to those who’ve always believed there’s another world than the one that meets the eye. Those fated to make the passage are marked forever by a map of that wondrous city tattooed on their flesh after a single orgasmic night. To this kingdom of ghost trains, lion-priests, living kanji, and cream-filled canals come four travelers.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Excellent Prose, but lacks maturity
- By Michael on 08-09-15
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Pearl in a Cage
- By: Joy Dettman
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Pearl in a Cage
- By Verita on 06-16-17
By: Joy Dettman
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,090
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,713
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,709
Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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The Essex Serpent
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Perry
- Narrated by: Juanita McMahon
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,136
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,030
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,030
When Cora Seaborne's brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at 19, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive 11-year old son, Francis, and the boy's nanny, Martha.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Unbearable Narrator
- By ACB on 06-08-17
By: Sarah Perry
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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 712
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 610
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 607
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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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,089
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 1,398
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,391
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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1 out of 5 stars
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Without a Map
- A Memoir
- By: Meredith Hall
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Not Your Average "16 and Pregnant"
- By Susie on 12-11-12
By: Meredith Hall
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 513
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 364
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Story4 out of 5 stars 362
The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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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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Overall4 out of 5 stars 93
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 79
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Story4 out of 5 stars 77
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautifully written
- By Patricia S. on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
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The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
- By: Leslye Walton
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 449
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 402
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Story4 out of 5 stars 400
Magical realism, lyrical prose, and the pain and passion of human love haunt this hypnotic generational saga. Foolish love appears to be the Roux family birthright, an ominous forecast for its most recent progeny, Ava Lavender.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful and Haunting Fairytale
- By FanB14 on 07-24-15
By: Leslye Walton
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The Third Daughter
- A Novel
- By: Talia Carner
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 407
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 365
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 362
The turn of the 20th century finds 14-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family endless pogroms. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairytale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon, she discovers that she’s entered a waking nightmare. Her new “husband” does indeed bring her to America.
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5 out of 5 stars
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brilliant novel based on shocking truth
- By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on 07-05-20
By: Talia Carner
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Leopard at the Door
- By: Jennifer McVeigh
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 441
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 388
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 385
After six years in England, Rachel has returned to Kenya and the farm where she spent her childhood, but the beloved home she'd longed for is much changed. Her father's new companion - a strange, intolerant woman - has taken over the household. The political climate in the country grows more unsettled by the day and is approaching the boiling point. And looming over them all is the threat of the Mau Mau, a secret society intent on uniting the native Kenyans and overthrowing the whites.
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5 out of 5 stars
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IMPERIALISM
- By Haberwoman on 08-02-18
By: Jennifer McVeigh