
The Magician's Assistant
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Narrated by:
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Karen Ziemba
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By:
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Ann Patchett
About this listen
When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a father she never knew he had.
©1997 Ann Patchett (P)2008 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"The kindliness of The Magician's Assistant is beguiling, and Patchett is an adroit, graceful writer. . . she is especially practiced at the razzle-dazzle of odd juxtapositions." (New York Times Book Review)
"A saga of redemption tenderly and terrifically told." (Kirkus Reviews)
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Story
“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.
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Heartfelt Essays, Beautifully Performed
- By Brent Holcomb on 11-23-21
By: Ann Patchett
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Commonwealth
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Hope Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly - thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
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Patchett and Me--In-sympatico
- By Mel on 09-18-16
By: Ann Patchett
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The Dutch House
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Tom Hanks
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother.
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Not my favorite Patchett
- By Regina on 12-07-19
By: Ann Patchett
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Tom Lake
- A Novel
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Meryl Streep
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In the spring of 2020, Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
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So incredibly boring
- By Rhonda Morrison on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
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Lambslide
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Nicolette Farmer is running for class president, and the rest of the Farmer family tells her she’ll win by a landslide. A pack of overconfident lambs mistakenly hear lambslide and can’t believe there’s a slide made just for them. But when they can’t find one on the farm, there’s only one thing left to do: take a vote! They campaign. They bargain. They ask all the other animals if they, too, would like a lambslide.
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Short and Sweet. And good.
- By Susanna Goodin on 08-05-23
By: Ann Patchett
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A Piece of the World
- A Novel
- By: Christina Baker Kline
- Narrated by: Polly Stone
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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To Christina Olson, the entire world was her family's remote farm in the small coastal town of Cushing, Maine. Born in the home her family had lived in for generations, and increasingly incapacitated by illness, Christina seemed destined for a small life. Instead, for more than 20 years, she was host to and inspiration for the artist Andrew Wyeth and became the subject of one of the best known American paintings of the 20th century.
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Wyeth's Vision Comes to Life
- By Poppy on 03-04-17
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Small Wonder
- By: Barbara Kingsolver
- Narrated by: Barbara Kingsolver
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us from one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from recent news about a lost child saved in an astonishing way, the book moves on to consider a world of surprising and hopeful prospects, ranging from an inventive conservation scheme in a remote jungle to the backyard flock of chickens tended by the author's small daughter.
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Not much of a Wonder
- By Max on 10-20-06
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rodgers
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family that could never be his own. Now Pearl and her three grown children have gathered....
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Classic Anne Tyler
- By Eve Harris on 09-14-21
By: Anne Tyler
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Shanghai Girls
- A Novel
- By: Lisa See
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 13 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Thanks to the financial security and material comforts provided by their father’s prosperous rickshaw business, 21-year-old Pearl Chin and her younger sister, May, are having the time of their lives. Though both sisters wave off authority and tradition, they couldn’t be more different, but both are beautiful, modern, and carefree...until the day their father tells them he has gambled away their wealth and that in order to repay his debts, he must sell the girls as wives to suitors who have traveled from California to find Chinese brides.
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Touching, sad, and enjoyable
- By Beach Biker on 07-15-09
By: Lisa See
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When We Believed in Mermaids
- A Novel
- By: Barbara O'Neal
- Narrated by: Sarah Naughton, Katherine Littrell
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Josie Bianci was killed years ago on a train during a terrorist attack. Gone forever. It’s what her sister, Kit, an ER doctor in Santa Cruz, has always believed. Yet all it takes is a few heart-wrenching seconds to upend Kit’s world. Live coverage of a club fire in Auckland has captured the image of a woman stumbling through the smoke and debris. Her resemblance to Josie is unbelievable. And unmistakable. With it comes a flood of emotions - grief, loss, and anger - that Kit finally has a chance to put to rest: by finding the sister who’s been living a lie.
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Still listening, but barely...
- By katie brinson on 11-11-19
By: Barbara O'Neal
the magicians Assistant
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A Journey Through the Richness and Variety of Love
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Somber and a bit plodding
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A learning experience
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Non event
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Magic tricks
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This one is dfferent. I had great hopes for this story until the end of the book was approaching and it seemed there was too much to put in any order. Her final "trick" reminded me of the cartoon of the student with a complex math proof on the board and one section that reads "then a miracle occurs." So there's that, and then a few more paragraphs, and then there's no next paragraph. It's just weird.
And that awful jarring music! How could the audio producer have thought THAT was a good idea?
So disappointing
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I liked it, even gave it 4 stars but it's flawed
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What was the point?
Really enjoyable
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The Ending???
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