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Whistling in the Dark
- Narrated by: Kendra Murray
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
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Whistling in the Dark
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Publisher's summary
Lucienne S. Bloch's beautifully written personal essays explore her world on the Upper West Side of New York City. Growing up in the 1950s as the daughter of refugees from Hitler’s Europe who longed for their former lives and culture, these essays explore her youth, her mother's Viennese upbringing, her father's work in the diamond business and long battle with Alzheimer’s, her typewriter, the landscapes of New York, her ongoing sense of alienation, and her development as a writer.
Listeners will be swept up in the graceful prose that distinguishes Lucienne S. Bloch’s award-winning work. The universal themes of memory, belonging, family, identity, survival, and aging are artfully woven throughout the essays in Whistling in the Dark and will resonate with listeners of all ages and backgrounds.
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-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 46
Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Annie Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to “capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.” She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Beautiful Tribute, Beautiful Writing
- By Amazon Customer on 07-07-23
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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When Time Stopped
- A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains
- By: Ariana Neumann
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 494
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 438
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Story5 out of 5 stars 437
In this remarkably moving memoir Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: years spent hiding in plain sight in war-torn Berlin, the annihilation of dozens of family members in the Holocaust, and the courageous choice to build anew.
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5 out of 5 stars
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yesterday as fresh as today
- By reader mother on 02-17-20
By: Ariana Neumann
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 122
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 95
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 34
A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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The Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 136
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 124
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Story4 out of 5 stars 125
Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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The Secret Life of Sunflowers
- By: Marta Molnar, Dana Marton
- Narrated by: Kendra Murray
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,320
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,232
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,232
When Hollywood auctioneer Emsley Wilson finds her famous grandmother's diary while cleaning out her New York brownstone, the pages are full of surprises. The first surprise is, the diary isn't her grandmother's. It belongs to Johanna Bonger, Vincent van Gogh's sister-in-law.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Nothing like a expected…
- By LOVETOQUILT on 05-06-23
By: Marta Molnar, and others
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Pages for You
- The Pages for You Series, Book 1
- By: Sylvia Brownrigg
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 6 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 50
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
In a steam-filled diner in a college town, Flannery Jansen catches sight of something more beautiful than she's ever seen: a graduate student, reading. The 17-year-old, new to everything around her - college, the East Coast, bodies of literature, and the sexual flurries of student life - is shocked by her desire to follow this wherever it will take her.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A gorgeous listen
- By MissLynn on 03-09-20
By: Sylvia Brownrigg
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The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 67
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 60
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
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5 out of 5 stars
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a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
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The Odd Woman and the City
- A Memoir
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 23
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story5 out of 5 stars 21
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Yet another Gornick masterpiece
- By Lo on 01-14-23
By: Vivian Gornick
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Bitter in the Mouth
- By: Monique Truong
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 52
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 41
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Story4 out of 5 stars 43
Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70’s and 80’s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two” are the cruel, mysterious last words that Linda’s grandmother ever says to her.
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2 out of 5 stars
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"Tasting Words" made this hard to hear!
- By Kate Anderson on 11-06-11
By: Monique Truong
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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 217
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 185
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Story4 out of 5 stars 184
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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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 192
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 153
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 153
One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 50
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 40
In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great story, poorly narrated
- By Oren Kessler on 09-10-24
By: Ariel Sabar
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The Sum of Our Days
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Blair Brown, Isabel Allende
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 54
Isabel Allende reconstructs the painful reality of her own life in the wake of the tragic death of her daughter, Paula. Narrated with warmth, humor, exceptional candor, and wisdom, this remarkable memoir is as exuberant and as full of life as its creator. Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory - and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.
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5 out of 5 stars
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She does not disappoint
- By ChiChi's Rule on 06-01-22
By: Isabel Allende
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 182
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 163
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Story4 out of 5 stars 162
Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith