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A Mercy
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's summary
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
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.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who's spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.
Featured Article: 85+ Toni Morrison Quotes on Life, Love, Freedom, and Hardships
The first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison, who passed away on August 5, 2019, left behind a legacy of wisdom in her novels and essays. Her work explores topics like human nature, happiness, love, and enduring hardships, but also delves into the subject of freedom and what that has meant for African Americans. These quotes will get you through tough times, inspire you to look at yourself, and much more.
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The audio is not the same as the book
- By Rocio on 03-29-16
By: Toni Morrison
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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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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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Recitatif
- A Story
- By: Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith - Introduction
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.
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Read the introduction last
- By Robert C Purnell on 02-01-22
By: Toni Morrison, and others
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Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
- By John R Williford on 07-14-06
By: Toni Morrison
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Song of Solomon
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.
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Maybe a beautiful story, This author should never narrate
- By Student on 01-02-20
By: Toni Morrison
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The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Amazing
- By psiegler on 07-25-18
By: Toni Morrison
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Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Alfre Woodard
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Abridged
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The author of Song of Solomon now sets her extraordinary novelistic powers on a striking new course. Tar Baby, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones—of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people.
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Son Finding
- By Carol Binta Nadeem on 08-21-20
By: Toni Morrison
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You and Only You
- Blessings, Georgia Series #1
- By: Sharon Sala
- Narrated by: Amy Rubinate
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Mike Dalton has secretly loved LilyAnn Bronte since they were children together in the small town of Blessings, Georgia. But one fateful day, T. J. Lachlan roars into town and starts showering LilyAnn with his charm, and Mike feels his dream of them being more than friends slipping away. LilyAnn, as anyone in Blessings will tell you, let herself go after her fiancé was killed in Iraq. The attention of the handsome new guy shocks her into a revelation: She's ready to live again, and maybe the best is yet to come.
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It was a great story
- By Victoria on 10-12-18
By: Sharon Sala
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The Source of Self-Regard
- Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
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Refreshing thoughts
- By Amazon Customer on 04-02-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There...where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose."
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Interestingly Bizarre
- By JC on 05-02-16
By: Toni Morrison
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The Furrows
- A Novel
- By: Namwali Serpell
- Narrated by: Kristen Ariza, Ryan Vincent Anderson, Dion Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Cassandra Williams is twelve; her little brother, Wayne, is seven. One day, when they’re alone together, there is an accident and Wayne is lost forever. His body is never recovered. The missing boy cleaves the family with doubt. Their father leaves, starts another family elsewhere. But their mother can’t give up hope and launches an organization dedicated to missing children. As C grows older, she sees her brother everywhere: in bistros, airplane aisles, subway cars.
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Appreciate the effort, but not a fan
- By N.Williams on 02-26-23
By: Namwali Serpell
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Darkness Under the Sun
- By: Dean Koontz
- Narrated by: Steven Weber
- Length: 1 hr and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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There once was a killer who knew the night, its secrets and rhythms. How to hide within its shadows. When to hunt. He roamed from town to town, city to city, choosing his prey for their beauty and innocence. His cruelties were infinite, his humanity long since forfeit. But still... he had not yet discovered how to make his special mark among monsters, how to come fully alive as Death. This is the story of how he learned those things, and of what we might do to ensure that he does not visit us.
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I wanted to mow the neighbors yard
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-26-12
By: Dean Koontz
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What listeners say about A Mercy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sarah
- 02-04-14
Absolutely LOVED this!!
Would you listen to A Mercy again? Why?
I will definitely listen to this again. I loved everything about it...and hated when it was done.
What did you like best about this story?
I felt connected and invested emotionally in the characters and their lives. I could "see" these people as I listened.
What about Toni Morrison’s performance did you like?
Her voice is captivating...I suppose her being the author allowed for the telling of the story the way she intended as opposed to how another narrator would have interpreted it. The emotion and passion of what she wanted to portray were felt.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
I actually did complete all of the book minus about 45 mins in one sitting. It was truly that good!
Any additional comments?
I love Toni Morrison's work. This was the first time I've listened to a book and now I cannot wait to listen to her "Beloved" even though I've read it twice already!
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- amrasa
- 02-01-24
Excellent story
The beginning was slow listening, then progressed as a great story. Really enjoyed the analysis at the end.
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- kd
- 08-26-12
Amazing story
Historically accurate, engrossing tale of North American immigrants before the revolutionary war. The interview with Toni Morrison at the end was especially good.
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- Jill Huggins
- 08-18-21
Difficult story to follow. Enjoyed TM nterview.
I found it a difficult story to follow as there were
many references to the characters previous lives Intertwined with the more current accounts of that period. Thus requiring this reader to review many chapters/ passages to get a clearer picture of the story.
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- Louie Hamilton-Martinez
- 05-29-20
Masterful folklore inculcation and empathy shared
Nearly a year after my soulmate's rest, A Mercy is approved for CAW-tM.
The betrayals of women to become mothers and of the men who revered them are uniquely inherent emnities bonded since the dawn of Creation.
The story of Jakob and Rebecca Vaark relates so much to the Christian storylines of Creation regarding Adam's walk with his god (Jakob with the blacksmith) and Yaashra'al's relationship with his mother impacting his stewardship towards his wives and possessions (Sir Vaark's adventures on his day job, managing the liquidity of gentry like Senyor's; the trips to the saloons; the introduction to an arranged marriage to Rebecca)
My zeal for A Mercy zeniths in Flourence physical trek to save the life of Mistress Rebecca, in finding the smithee. This trek and the character taking it reminds me of a struggle I face with everyday with mortality and with those few who depend on me frequently from a foreground aspect. I find that I need a holding down and tussle with an angel, like the blacksmith, to not only keep from pleasing folk at my expense, but to seek from our Creator the blessings he uniquely has for me.
A hero saves those in distress, not only from the dangers around them, if not those ones depreciated in distress. The common sense adage, "God helps those who help themselves," isn't in the Bible, and this adage isn't accurate by one word, "themselves." The reasoning is this: "must a gambler sell all his possessions to risk for earning more. How happy will that person be if he wins it all, and lose his soul?" For a protagonist caricature like Jakob Vaark, the hero risks his life to teach the underprivileged of society how to read and gives values to their lives, yet he cannot save his own life.
A hero is one whom God helps to help others. Why otherwise would Jesus willfully allow others to nail him to a tree to die? He will die to resurrect Senyora Morrison, if she allowed him to dine with her despite what her family may think.
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Overall
- Judith Seaboyer
- 11-23-08
Toni Morrison
What a gift to have Toni Morrison read her exquisite novel, and to have the pleasure of an interview in addition. How gracious she is as an interviewee, especially given how much of it she must have to do on book tours and so on.
Don't miss this! And even if you've read Beloved on the page, do consider listening to Morrison read that, too.
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16 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Tater
- 12-23-08
Listening was a challenge
Sorry, I love Toni Morrison's writing, and she has a lovely rich voice, but her pauses are as regular as a slow ticking clock no matter how long the sentence or how varied its structure. I found myself predicting each pause, which made listening to the story less than optimum, tedious, in fact. I have the same opinion of the spoken version of Beloved, one of my favorite books. Please, Ms. Morrison, your novels deserve professional readers.
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10 people found this helpful
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- C. Gaylord
- 04-27-14
I had to buy the book!
I hadn't finished listening to Ms Morrison narrate her book when I ordered it from Amazon.com. When the book arrived, I read along as Ms Morrison narrated it. Her reading cadence exposes subtleties that I would have missed had I read the story to myself. A Mercy sheds light on our dark history. It also leaves me puzzled about some things. A tremendous amount of research went into writing A Mercy. It is not a off-the-top-of-one's-head novel. I will do some research myself and then read the book again. Oh, and not all indentured people were black. NOTE: A very informative interview follows the narration of this book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Zerita V Phillips
- 01-27-23
Captivating use of language.
A brilliant telling of a story from a perspective not often imagined, considered, or explored.
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- Jennifer W. Gardiner
- 01-15-23
Mercy
Thanks Toni. This is a great novel. The interview was also informative. I thoroughly enjoyed this audible.
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