The Whale Tattoo
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The Whale Tattoo
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Narrated by:
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Luke Francis
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By:
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Jon Ransom
About this listen
Cruelly beautiful, utterly authentic - introducing a searingly talented new Queer writer. A novel for fans of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Peach by Emma Glass and Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones.
When a giant sperm whale washes up on the local beach and tells Joe Gunner that death will follow him wherever he goes. Joe knows that the place he needs to go is home. Having stormed out two years ago, it won't be easy. Nor will returning to the river alongside the house where words ripple beneath the muddy black water washing up all sorts of memories and disturbing prophecies. Joe turns to his sister, Birdee, the only person who has ever listened and to Tim Fysh, a local fisherman and longtime lover - but reviving their bond leads to trouble. Joe tells himself that the whale's predictions are wrong but the river is relentless. As the waters settle, Joe learns the truth and finds that all of us can hate, but we can make a choice not to. Ransom's fractured, distinctive prose highlights the beauty and brutality of his story. His extraordinarily vivid sense of place saturates the reader with the wet of the river, and the salty tang of the heaving sea.
This novel contains adult themes, strong language, and some scenes that might be upsetting to listeners.
Self described as a working-class, Queer author, Jon Ransom began by writing stories on his phone. He was mentored by Anjali Joseph as part of the 2019 Escalator Talent Development scheme at the National Centre for Writing and his short stories have appeared in Foglifter Journal, SAND Journal and FIVE:2:ONE and Queer Life, Queer Love (Nov 21) amongst others. In 2021 he was awarded a grant by Arts Council England to develop his creative practice. He cites Garth Greenwell, Sayaka Murata and Édouard Louis as some of his many influences.
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Critic reviews
The Whale Tattoo' is a stunning achievement - one of the most impressive and assured debuts I've ever read.
-- Matt Cain
A bold, brilliant and beautiful debut.
-- Susannah Dunn
With assured narrative, a vivid sense of place and atmosphere, and flint-sharp dialogue, Jon Ransom has written a novel that is bleak and brutal, but never sentimental.. utterly authentic and cruelly beautiful.
-- Matt Bates
Raw, uncompromising, and authentic, a remarkable debut from an astonishingly gifted writer.
-- Golnoosh Nour
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
Best friends Jack and Conner can’t stay away from Marbury. It’s partly because of their obsession with this alternate world and the unresolved war that still wages there. But it’s also because forces in Marbury - including the darkest of the dark, who were not revealed in The Marbury Lens - are beckoning the boys back in order to save their friends… and themselves.
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5 out of 5 stars
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plot twist at the end of the book 🤤🤤
- By melanie on 11-10-17
By: Andrew Smith
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Disappearing Act
- A Host of Other Characters in 16 Short Stories
- By: Robert Sheehan
- Narrated by: Robert Sheehan
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 37
In his debut collection of short stories, Robert Sheehan disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles. Informed by the author’s peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters’ streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, exploring the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives.
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2 out of 5 stars
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as strange as he is
- By DEKEY on 04-08-24
By: Robert Sheehan
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Everything Under
- A Novel
- By: Daisy Johnson
- Narrated by: Esther Wane
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story4 out of 5 stars 75
The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A brilliantly understated classic
- By Jeff Lacy on 10-29-19
By: Daisy Johnson
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The Marbury Lens
- By: Andrew Smith
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4 out of 5 stars 69
Sixteen-year-old Jack gets drunk and finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time: he is kidnapped, but escapes, narrowly. The only person he tells is his best friend, Conner. When they arrive in London as planned for their summer break, a stranger hands Jack a pair of glasses. Through the lenses, he sees another world called Marbury. There is war in Marbury, which is a desolate and murderous place where Jack is responsible for the survival of two younger boys.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Like an addiction, I just couldn't stop listening.
- By Gini McKellar on 11-24-10
By: Andrew Smith
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Elmet
- By: Fiona Mozley
- Narrated by: Gareth Bennett Ryan
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 538
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 500
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Story4 out of 5 stars 499
In this atmospheric and profoundly moving debut, Cathy and Daniel live with their father, John, in the remote woods of Yorkshire, in a house the three of them built themselves. John is a gentle brute of a man, a former enforcer who fights for money when he has to, but who otherwise just wants to be left alone to raise his children. When a local landowner shows up on their doorstep, their precarious existence is threatened, and a series of actions is set in motion that can only end in violence.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Strains credibility
- By DM on 01-06-18
By: Fiona Mozley
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The Hollow Ground
- By: Natalie S. Harnett
- Narrated by: Luci Christian
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 534
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 469
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Story4 out of 5 stars 472
The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced 11-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung-stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Disfunction makes a good read
- By NHull on 05-30-14
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Scribbling the Cat
- Travels with an African Soldier
- By: Alexandra Fuller
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 233
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 141
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Story4 out of 5 stars 142
When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger". Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Astonishing
- By G. Robinson on 06-27-04
By: Alexandra Fuller
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Long Lankin
- By: Lindsey Barraclough
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 53
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
When Cora and her little sister, Mimi, are sent to stay with their great-aunt in the isolated village of Bryers Guerdon, they receive a less than warm welcome and are desperate to go back to London. But Auntie Ida’s life was devastated the last time two young girls were at Guerdon Hall, and now her nieces’ arrival has reawakened an evil that has lain in wait for years. A haunting voice in an empty room; a strange, scarred man lurking in the graveyard; mysterious words scrawled on the walls of the abandoned church ... all point to a horrifying truth that has held Bryers Guerdon in its grip for centuries.
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5 out of 5 stars
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AMAZING!!!
- By Sharron on 09-06-14
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Blackbirds
- Miriam Black, Book 1
- By: Chuck Wendig
- Narrated by: Emily Beresford
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 444
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 403
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Story4 out of 5 stars 400
Miriam Black knows when you will die. Still in her early twenties, she’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, suicides, and slow deaths by cancer. But when Miriam hitches a ride with truck driver Louis Darling and shakes his hand, she sees that in thirty days he will be gruesomely murdered while he calls her name. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. No matter what she does, she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Not for the faint of heart or kids but exciting
- By Steph on 04-07-14
By: Chuck Wendig
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Sometimes a Great Notion
- By: Ken Kesey
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 30 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 853
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 739
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 730
A literary icon sometimes seen as a bridge between the Beat Generation and the hippies, Ken Kesey scored an unexpected hit with his first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His successful follow-up, Sometimes a Great Notion, was also transformed into a major motion picture, directed by and starring Paul Newman. Here, Oregon’s Stamper family does what it can to survive a bitter strike dividing their tiny logging community. And as tensions rise, delicate family bonds begin to fray and unravel.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Sometimes a Great Novel Pops up out of Nowhere
- By Mr. Eyuz on 06-07-19
By: Ken Kesey
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The New Moon's Arms
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Gin Hammond
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 398
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 352
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 353
Calamity is confronting two big transitions: the death of her beloved father and the beginning of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her gift for finding lost things. Suddenly, she is getting hot flashes that seem to forge objects out of thin air, most notably a four-year old boy. As Calamity takes the child into her care, she discovers that all is not as it seems. Then, Calamity must reawaken to the mysteries surrounding her own childhood and the early disappearance of her mother.
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5 out of 5 stars
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What a joy
- By newmoon on 07-05-19
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Of Mice and Minestrone
- Hap and Leonard: The Early Years (Hap and Leonard)
- By: Kathleen Kent - introduction, Kasey Lansdale - contributor, Joe R. Lansdale
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 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
Hap Collins looks like a good ol’ boy. But even in his misspent youth, his best pal is Leonard Pine, who is Black, gay, and the ultimate outsider. Inseparable friends, Hap and Leonard climb into the boxing ring, visit their families, get in bar fights, and just go fishing - all the while confronting racists, righting wrongs, and eating a whole lot of delicious food.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Wringing every last drop
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 04-08-23
By: Kathleen Kent - introduction, and others
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Boy Swallows Universe
- A Novel
- By: Trent Dalton
- Narrated by: Stig Wemyss
- Length: 16 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 562
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 490
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 491
Eli Bell’s life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli’s life is Slim - a notorious felon and national record holder for successful prison escapes - who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother. Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, this 12-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. But life insists on throwing obstacles in Eli’s path.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A beautiful adventure both on paper and in audio
- By David on 06-17-20
By: Trent Dalton
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The Necromancer's House
- By: Christopher Buehlman
- Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 491
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 435
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Story4 out of 5 stars 434
Andrew Ranulf Blankenship is a handsome, stylish nonconformist with wry wit, a classic Mustang, and a massive library. He is also a recovering alcoholic and a practicing warlock, able to speak with the dead through film. His house is a maze of sorcerous booby traps and escape tunnels, as yours might be if you were sitting on a treasury of Russian magic stolen from the Soviet Union thirty years ago.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Finally - Magic / Fantasy Novel for adults.
- By David on 04-23-14
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The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
- By: Hannah Tinti
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 13 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 487
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 445
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Story4 out of 5 stars 443
After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past - a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Odd choice for narrator
- By lindsey b. on 01-23-19
By: Hannah Tinti
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The Fireman
- A Novel
- By: Joe Hill
- Narrated by: Kate Mulgrew
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8,327
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7,697
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Story4 out of 5 stars 7,676
No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it's Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies - before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe.
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3 out of 5 stars
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GOD'S WAITING ROOM; AKA FLORIDA
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-25-17
By: Joe Hill
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Battleborn
- By: Claire Vaye Watkins
- Narrated by: Ali Ahn, Morgan Hallett, Laura Knight Keating, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 50
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 39
Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wonderful magnificent stories beautifully told
- By Pedro Ramirez on 12-03-15
What listeners say about The Whale Tattoo
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- soltex41
- 03-08-22
Not prefect but pretty damn good
the writing really kept my attention, the performance by the narrator was outstanding, the plot was a little lacking in a few places, but over all a great story!. Really look forward to the next work of Jon Ransom!
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