The Line of Beauty
A Novel
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The Line of Beauty
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Narrated by:
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Joe Jameson
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, read by Joe Jameson.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize
Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review
International Bestseller
From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy.
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby—whom Nick had idolized at Oxford—and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions.
As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 228
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 200
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 201
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 447
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 344
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Story4 out of 5 stars 349
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
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Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 38
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 221
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 189
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Story4 out of 5 stars 188
In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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3 out of 5 stars
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 196
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 168
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Story4 out of 5 stars 168
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
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A Mercy
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 498
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 295
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 294
Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh north. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book
- By Pablo Tebas on 01-18-09
By: Toni Morrison
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Disorderly Men
- A Novel
- By: Edward Cahill
- Narrated by: Eric Fox
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
Three gay men in pre-Stonewall New York City find their fates thrown together in the police raid of a Village bar. The three men find themselves in a police wagon together, their hidden lives threatened to be revealed to the world. Blackmail, a private investigator, Gus’s disappearance, and Danny’s quest for retribution propel Disorderly Men to its piercing conclusion, as each man meets the boundaries of his own fear, love, and shame. The stakes for each are different, but all of them confront a fundamental question: How much happiness is he allowed to have . . .
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Sneailky Relatable Book!
- By John Latona on 10-09-23
By: Edward Cahill
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White Teeth
- A Novel
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 795
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 686
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Story4 out of 5 stars 679
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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5 out of 5 stars
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
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The Argonauts
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,423
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,242
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,244
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A relaxing meditation on identity, gender and art
- By redhidari on 10-01-15
By: Maggie Nelson
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The Last Samurai
- By: Helen DeWitt
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.)
By: Helen DeWitt
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A Manual for Cleaning Women
- Selected Stories
- By: Lucia Berlin
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera, Dawn Harvey, Carol Monda, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 387
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 325
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Story4 out of 5 stars 325
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers, and bad Christians.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Exquisite writing, lopsided performances
- By Sazafrass on 03-02-16
By: Lucia Berlin
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The Sellout
- A Novel
- By: Paul Beatty
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant.
By: Paul Beatty
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Random Family
- Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- By: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 241
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 217
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 214
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Speechless
- By Amazon Customer on 09-02-19
Perfect Prose
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Loved loved loved
Absolutely Stunning
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