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Being Dead
- Narrated by: Virginia Leishman
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
National Book Critics Circle, Fiction, 2001
Jim Crace has been called "one of the brightest lights in contemporary British fiction" by The New York Times Book Review. His novels have won a Whitbread Prize, an E.M. Forster Award, the Guardian Fiction Award, the GAP International Prize for Literature, and have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Far-ranging in its imagery, Being Dead is a provocative examination of mortality. A middle-aged couple, Joseph and Celice, are murdered on a remote East Coast sand dune. They are not discovered for six days. Both doctors of zoology, Joseph and Celice would recognize what is happening to their decomposing bodies if they could have watched. They are dead, but they remain part of the living for a while as they become food, shelter, icons, and sources of emotional catharsis. As Jim Crace examines the various facets of these two people's lives and deaths, he creates an extraordinary journey through haunting physical, scientific, and philosophical landscapes. Narrator Virginia Leishman provides the perfect tones for Crace's remarkable, lyrical text.
Critic reviews
"Crace is a brilliant British writer whose novels are always varied in historical setting, voice, theme and writing style, and are surprising in content....This latest, sixth effort, a stunning look at two people at the moment of their deaths, is the riskiest of his works, the most mesmerizing, and the most deeply felt....His finesse in drawing character is matched by the depth of his knowledge and imagination, and the honesty of his bleak vision." (Publishers Weekly)
"It's not clear to me why Jim Crace isn't world famous. Few novels are as unsparing as this one in presenting the ephemerality of love given the implacability of death, and few are as moving in depicting the undiminished achievement love nevertheless represents." (The New York Times Book Review)
"A brilliant, astonishing novel." (The Times [London])
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A compelling tale of two women separated by a century who discover long-buried secrets in an Australian manor house. In 1891, Tilly Kirkland is reeling with shock and guilt after her tempestuous marriage ends in horrific circumstances. Fleeing to the farthest place she knows, Tilly takes a job on Ember Island in Moreton Bay, Australia, where she becomes the governess to the prison superintendent's precocious young daughter, Nell.
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Not her best book
- By Beth on 05-02-18
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The Stolen Child
- By: Keith Donohue
- Narrated by: Andy Paris, Jeff Woodman
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven-year-old Henry Day is kidnapped and renamed "Aniday" by changelings, ageless beings who inhabit the woods near his home. The changelings also leave behind one of their own, who flawlessly impersonates Henry except for one noteworthy detail: the new Henry is a prodigiously talented pianist.
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Not Anything Close to the Hype
- By Jon on 06-20-06
By: Keith Donohue
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White Dog Fell from the Sky
- By: Eleanor Morse
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Botswana, 1976: Isaac Muthethe thinks he is dead. Smuggled across the border from South Africa in a hearse, he awakens covered in dust, staring at blue sky and the face of White Dog. Far from dead, he is, for the first time, in a country without apartheid. A medical student in South Africa, he was forced to flee after witnessing a friend murdered by white members of the South African Defense Force.
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Unexpectedly Stunning Work!
- By Kathi on 03-15-13
By: Eleanor Morse
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The Wild Hunt
- By: Emma Seckel
- Narrated by: Ruth Urquhart
- Length: 8 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Leigh Welles has not set foot in on the island in years, but when she finds herself called home from a disappointing life on the Scottish mainland by her father's unexpected death, she is determined to forget the sorrows of the past and start fresh. Fellow islander Iain MacTavish, a RAF veteran with his eyes on the sky and his head in the past, is also in desperate need of a new beginning. A young widower, Iain struggles to return to the normal life he knew before the war. But this October is anything but normal. This October, the sluagh are restless.
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Perfect narration for this story
- By Amy on 05-28-23
By: Emma Seckel
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The Keys to the Street
- By: Ruth Rendell
- Narrated by: Simon Russell Beale
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Jago had donated her own bone marrow to save the life of someone she didn’t know. And this generous act led directly to the bitter break-up of her affair with Alistair. For him, it was as though her beauty had been plundered. But the man whose life she had saved would change Mary’s life in a way she could never have imagined.
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Mystery with humor and insight
- By Ida Hagman on 10-02-12
By: Ruth Rendell
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Trigger Warning
- Short Fictions and Disturbances
- By: Neil Gaiman
- Narrated by: Neil Gaiman
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In this new anthology, Neil Gaiman pierces the veil of reality to reveal the enigmatic, shadowy world that lies beneath. Trigger Warning includes previously published pieces of short fiction--stories, verse, and a very special Doctor Who story that was written for the fiftieth anniversary of the beloved series in 2013--as well as "Black Dog", a new tale that revisits the world of American Gods, exclusive to this collection.
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It Triggered Me to Stay Up Late and Listen
- By Jan on 02-10-15
By: Neil Gaiman
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The Boy Who Drew Monsters
- By: Keith Donohue
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Ever since he nearly drowned in the ocean three years earlier, 10-year-old Jack Peter Keenan has been deathly afraid to venture outdoors. Refusing to leave his home in a small coastal town in Maine, Jack Peter spends his time drawing monsters. When those drawings take on a life of their own, no one is safe from the terror they inspire.
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troubled boy, troubled waters
- By Debra B on 10-29-14
By: Keith Donohue
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Putney
- A Novel
- By: Sofka Zinovieff
- Narrated by: Michelle Ford
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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The Incarnations
- A Novel
- By: Susan Barker
- Narrated by: Timo Chen, Joy Osmanski
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Who are you? You must be wondering. I am your soul mate, your old friend, and I have come back to this city of 16 million in search of you. So begins the first letter that falls into Wang's lap as he flips down the visor in his taxi. The letters that follow are filled with the stories of Wang's previous lives - from escaping a marriage to a spirit bride to being a slave on the run from Genghis Khan to living as a fisherman during the Opium Wars and being a teenager on the Red Guard during the cultural revolution.
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What was that you said?
- By cecil reniche-smith on 08-29-15
By: Susan Barker
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The Poison Tree
- By: Erin Kelly
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Successful journalist Erin Kelly has electrified readers and critics alike with her debut novel The Poison Tree. In this scintillating work, Karen and her daughter Alice have established a safe, happy life free from the madness of Karen’s past. But when Karen’s former lover Rex is released from prison, her old associations intrude upon the present - and threaten everything she holds dear.
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I couldn't stop listening the book.
- By Gladys on 07-29-15
By: Erin Kelly
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English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery.
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As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul - the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter - environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man - she was doing her small part to build a better world.
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Believe the Hype
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The Tiger's Wife
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In a Balkan country mending from war, Natalia, a young doctor, is compelled to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding her beloved grandfather’s recent death. Searching for clues, she turns to his worn copy of The Jungle Book and the stories he told her of his encounters over the years with “the deathless man.” But most extraordinary of all is the story her grandfather never told her - the legend of the tiger’s wife.
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Not a fan
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White Teeth
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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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4.68 stars....a modern classic
- By ibillinsly@gmail on 06-06-18
By: Zadie Smith
What listeners say about Being Dead
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Allegra
- 03-12-08
beautiful, stirring
Being Dead
I know I shall read (listen to) Being Dead again and again for its language, its beach landscape interpolated with scenes from the main characters' lives and their shared histories, its study of the physical decomposition of two people (yet each had achieved a kind of peace with him/herself in life), for the author's power to focus on time, a time, on objects, on two people, and for the understated ontological and biological asking and answering, asking and answering that is a seamless part of the whole.
Too, I was lucky enough to read Being Dead right after reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy...each book complementing the other in so many unexpected ways.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Michael
- 03-14-06
To die for
Ahhhh…what a wonderful listen. A beautiful, memorable, and unique story that is both surprising and obvious. The characters are real, unremarkable, people viewed unromantically, but not dryly or scientifically. Perhaps calling this a meditation is the best I can do. The story is a meditation on our life and our death as it is actually exists. I loved this book. It is worth more than one listen.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Bob
- 01-29-10
Strange book
I agree with most of the others here. This was a very strange book. It is not a novel with a plot, kind of goes backward and is more prose than a straight story. However, I think it took a lot of talent to put it together the way it was, so I gave it 3 stars. If you tend to think "Outside the Box" you should enjoy this.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall
- Paula Grabowski
- 03-21-09
An odd, but enjoyable journey
I too, was attracted to the prose. I liked the voice of the reader, but I'm a sucker for an english accent. The first reviewer states that this book "defies genre" and I agree. I like odd things and I liked this book.
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Overall
- David
- 03-11-08
Meditation
Having read the other reviews I am struck that nobody has mentioned an aspect that I found most intriguing... the book flows backwards. Each chapter ends with you wondering how did we get 'here'. The next chapter answers.
The writing verges on poetry. The characters are beautifully developed in a way that makes the ordinary special. This is not a book about plot, in the common sense, but rather a book with a plot in a much larger sense - for all things move forward and all things move back infinitely.
A very interesting thought experiment, writing experiment, mediation on death, life and character.
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Overall
- Margaret
- 08-13-08
A hard book to characterize
This book was a raft of contradictions for me.
It was gorgeously written, and nicely narrated. Yet, it took me longer than usual to get through it (I kept falling asleep.) It is the world's strangest bedtime story. It is an amazing contemplation on mortality, connection to humanity, and connection to nature. It's lovely, horrifying, engrossing, and boring all at the same time.
I highly recommend it to anyone who isn't looking for a standard listen, a predictable story, an average plot. There isn't much plot here (yet it's the world's biggest plot). People who enjoy a story that isn't the ordinary will like this. Others... well, you see their one-star reviews.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- C L
- 04-19-16
Not as profound as I'd hoped
I got the impression this would be more about the couples' lives post mortem, but actually most of the book is flashbacks to the couple's "origin story." A fine read, but actually less macabre than I'd hoped, and less thought-provoking than I'd expected from other reviews here. It's fine.
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Overall
- Glenn A Miller
- 08-22-05
Wonderful use of language
A story like none you've ever heard, I'd bet. I can't say much without spoiling it.
Just trust that you will hear phrases turned with such grace and skill that you will be left wanting at the end and whatever book you read next will suffer because of it.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- J. C. AZ
- 12-21-07
Contemplating Death
Perhaps, having had a child die, I have a greater interest in contemplating death than the average listener. I found the book to be magical and plan to listen to it again. There is no problem with the narrator that I perceived. The author has a gift for language that supersedes any in my recollection.
If you are adventurous in the truest sense (not in the car chase – building explosion way), give this a listen.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Glenn
- 08-22-05
Wonderful use of language
A story like none you've ever heard, I'd bet. I can't say much without spoiling it.
Just trust that you will hear phrases turned with such grace and skill that you will be left wanting at the end and whatever book you read next will suffer because of it.
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9 people found this helpful