-
A Mercy
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $13.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Love
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: All women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
-
-
Wonderful
- By Steve on 05-22-10
By: Toni Morrison
-
Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. 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.
-
-
MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
-
Home
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
-
-
not a novel, but a collection of short stories
- By Melinda on 06-14-12
By: Toni Morrison
-
Jazz
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 3 hrs
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People).
-
-
The audio is not the same as the book
- By Rocio on 03-29-16
By: Toni Morrison
-
Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Author-read Books
- By John R Williford on 07-14-06
By: Toni Morrison
-
God Help the Child
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger.
-
-
God Help Us All
- By Tzynya Pinchback on 04-24-15
By: Toni Morrison
-
Love
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire. May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: All women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.
-
-
Wonderful
- By Steve on 05-22-10
By: Toni Morrison
-
Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. 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.
-
-
MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
-
Home
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.
-
-
not a novel, but a collection of short stories
- By Melinda on 06-14-12
By: Toni Morrison
-
Jazz
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 3 hrs
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, attacks the girl’s corpse. This novel “transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious” (People).
-
-
The audio is not the same as the book
- By Rocio on 03-29-16
By: Toni Morrison
-
Beloved
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Author-read Books
- By John R Williford on 07-14-06
By: Toni Morrison
-
God Help the Child
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger.
-
-
God Help Us All
- By Tzynya Pinchback on 04-24-15
By: Toni Morrison
-
Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
-
Song of Solomon
- A Novel
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Maybe a beautiful story, This author should never narrate
- By Student on 01-02-20
By: Toni Morrison
-
Playing in the Dark
- Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 3 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires. According to the Chicago Tribune, Morrison "reimagines and remaps the possibility of America." Her brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition.
-
-
My goodness..get ready to be challenged
- By keishie23 on 05-13-20
By: Toni Morrison
-
Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Desiree Coleman
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
-
-
So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
By: Toni Morrison
-
The Bluest Eye
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Amazing
- By psiegler on 07-25-18
By: Toni Morrison
-
The Source of Self-Regard
- Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Refreshing thoughts
- By Amazon Customer on 04-02-19
By: Toni Morrison
-
Recitatif
- A Story
- By: Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith - Introduction
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 1 hr and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Read the introduction last
- By Robert C Purnell on 02-01-22
By: Toni Morrison, and others
-
Their Eyes Were Watching God
- By: Zora Neale Hurston
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.
-
-
perfection
- By Mel on 04-06-15
-
Witch Child
- By: Celia Rees
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ehle
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1659 and Mary Newbury, theyoung granddaughter of a witch, sees her wise and beloved grandmother tortured and hanged as a servant of the Devil. Then a stranger with hauntingly familiar eyes approaches her with an opportunity - safe passage to America. But the difficult ocean voyage only leads her to a community of inflexible, fearful grownups who try to decide for her who and what she will be. Mary must disguise herself as a pious Puritan girl, hiding her true nature, or else face terrible danger once again.
-
-
Do Not Suffer a Witch to Live Among You
- By Joseph R on 08-20-09
By: Celia Rees
-
The Sound and the Fury
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
-
-
Hang in
- By W.Denis on 07-11-05
By: William Faulkner
-
Ragtime
- By: E. L. Doctorow
- Narrated by: E. L. Doctorow
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears.
-
-
too good for words
- By connie on 10-05-08
By: E. L. Doctorow
-
You Can Thank Me Later
- A Novella
- By: Kelly Harms
- Narrated by: Lauren Fortgang
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Original Recording
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the Dickenson clan sits down for Thanksgiving dinner in 2016, it is the last holiday where their tight-knit family will ever be the same. Oldest brother Pete and his wife are expecting their first child. Youngest sibling Sophie is too busy running her restaurant. The Little Plum, to bother with any kind of social life. And middle child Charlie’s happy, uncomplicated life as a midwestern science professor is upended when his wife Annette is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Knowing this will be her last Thanksgiving, Annette asks Sophie to look after Charlie after she’s gone.
-
-
Kinda depressing
- By Tonya on 11-01-19
By: Kelly Harms
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.
Related to this topic
-
Walk In My Soul
- By: Lucia St. Clair Robson
- Narrated by: Laurie Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart.
-
-
i honestly don't know what is going in this book
- By Bryntainia Holloway on 09-21-19
-
Mirror Mirror
- By: Gregory Maguire
- Narrated by: John McDonough, Kate Forbes, Barbara Rosenblat, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives at Montefiore, the farm of her father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up to the farm. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia, no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a quest, he leaves Bianca under the care of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but salvation can be found in the dark forest as well.
-
-
Interesting re-telling of the fairy tale.
- By Patricia on 03-04-10
By: Gregory Maguire
-
Shaman's Crossing, Book One of the Soldier Son Trilogy
- By: Robin Hobb
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 24 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hugo and Nebula Award finalist Robin Hobb crafts intricate fantasy tales featuring larger-than-life characters and exotic landscapes. Nevare Burvelle survives the King’s Cavalla Academy—where nepotism and corruption reign—to become a soldier in the Gernian king’s army. As he and his fellow soldiers are thrust onto the front lines of the king’s brutal territorial expansion campaign, they struggle against the Plainspeople—forest-dwellers who possess a powerful magic long dismissed by the Gernians.
-
-
Sometimes Magic Isn't A Good Thing
- By Therese M. Woolley on 10-18-13
By: Robin Hobb
-
The Irishman's Daughter
- By: V.S. Alexander
- Narrated by: Lucy Rayner
- Length: 16 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ireland, 1845. To Briana Walsh, no place on earth is more beautiful than Carrowteige, County Mayo. The small farms that surround the centuries-old Lear House are managed by her father, agent to the wealthy, reckless Sir Thomas Blakely. Tenant farmers sell the oats and rye they grow to pay rent to Sir Thomas, surviving on the potatoes that flourish in the remaining scraps of land. But when the potato crop falls prey to a devastating blight, families Briana has known all her life are left with no food, no resources, and no mercy from the English landowner.
-
-
Wasted a credit
- By Emily Coonce on 05-26-19
By: V.S. Alexander
-
Clearing in the Wild
- By: Jane Kirkpatrick
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Young Emma Wagner chafes at the constraints of Bethel colony, an 1850s religious community in Missouri that is determined to remain untainted by the concerns of the world. A passionate and independent thinker, she resents the limitations placed on women, who are expected to serve in quiet submission.
-
-
a clearing in the wild
- By katie on 07-21-09
By: Jane Kirkpatrick
-
The Architect's Apprentice
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Piter Marek
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1540, 12-year-old Jahan arrives in Istanbul. As an animal tamer in the sultan's menagerie, he looks after the exceptionally smart elephant Chota and befriends (and falls for) the sultan's beautiful daughter Princess Mihrimah. A palace education leads Jahan to Mimar Sinan, the empire's chief architect, who takes Jahan under his wing as they construct (with Chota's help) some of the most magnificent buildings in history.
-
-
I feel like I should like it more than I do
- By nyog on 04-19-17
By: Elif Shafak
-
Walk In My Soul
- By: Lucia St. Clair Robson
- Narrated by: Laurie Klein
- Length: 14 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart.
-
-
i honestly don't know what is going in this book
- By Bryntainia Holloway on 09-21-19
-
Mirror Mirror
- By: Gregory Maguire
- Narrated by: John McDonough, Kate Forbes, Barbara Rosenblat, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1502, and seven-year-old Bianca de Nevada lives at Montefiore, the farm of her father, Don Vicente. But one day a noble entourage makes its way up to the farm. In the presence of Cesare Borgia and his sister, the lovely and vain Lucrezia, no one can claim innocence for very long. When Borgia sends Don Vicente on a quest, he leaves Bianca under the care of Lucrezia. She plots a dire fate for the young girl in the woods below the farm, but salvation can be found in the dark forest as well.
-
-
Interesting re-telling of the fairy tale.
- By Patricia on 03-04-10
By: Gregory Maguire
-
Shaman's Crossing, Book One of the Soldier Son Trilogy
- By: Robin Hobb
- Narrated by: John Keating
- Length: 24 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Hugo and Nebula Award finalist Robin Hobb crafts intricate fantasy tales featuring larger-than-life characters and exotic landscapes. Nevare Burvelle survives the King’s Cavalla Academy—where nepotism and corruption reign—to become a soldier in the Gernian king’s army. As he and his fellow soldiers are thrust onto the front lines of the king’s brutal territorial expansion campaign, they struggle against the Plainspeople—forest-dwellers who possess a powerful magic long dismissed by the Gernians.
-
-
Sometimes Magic Isn't A Good Thing
- By Therese M. Woolley on 10-18-13
By: Robin Hobb
-
The Irishman's Daughter
- By: V.S. Alexander
- Narrated by: Lucy Rayner
- Length: 16 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ireland, 1845. To Briana Walsh, no place on earth is more beautiful than Carrowteige, County Mayo. The small farms that surround the centuries-old Lear House are managed by her father, agent to the wealthy, reckless Sir Thomas Blakely. Tenant farmers sell the oats and rye they grow to pay rent to Sir Thomas, surviving on the potatoes that flourish in the remaining scraps of land. But when the potato crop falls prey to a devastating blight, families Briana has known all her life are left with no food, no resources, and no mercy from the English landowner.
-
-
Wasted a credit
- By Emily Coonce on 05-26-19
By: V.S. Alexander
-
Clearing in the Wild
- By: Jane Kirkpatrick
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Young Emma Wagner chafes at the constraints of Bethel colony, an 1850s religious community in Missouri that is determined to remain untainted by the concerns of the world. A passionate and independent thinker, she resents the limitations placed on women, who are expected to serve in quiet submission.
-
-
a clearing in the wild
- By katie on 07-21-09
By: Jane Kirkpatrick
-
The Architect's Apprentice
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Piter Marek
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1540, 12-year-old Jahan arrives in Istanbul. As an animal tamer in the sultan's menagerie, he looks after the exceptionally smart elephant Chota and befriends (and falls for) the sultan's beautiful daughter Princess Mihrimah. A palace education leads Jahan to Mimar Sinan, the empire's chief architect, who takes Jahan under his wing as they construct (with Chota's help) some of the most magnificent buildings in history.
-
-
I feel like I should like it more than I do
- By nyog on 04-19-17
By: Elif Shafak
-
She Would Be King
- A Novel
- By: Wayétu Moore
- Narrated by: Wayétu Moore
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.
-
-
Beautiful example of magical realism.
- By Danielle on 10-07-18
By: Wayétu Moore
-
Wicked
- The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
- By: Gregory Maguire
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 19 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Heralded as an instant classic of fantasy literature, Maguire has written a wonderfully imaginative retelling of The Wizard of Oz told from the Wicked Witch's point of view. More than just a fairy tale for adults, Wicked is a meditation on the nature of good and evil.
-
-
It's not easy being green
- By PangaeaReads on 07-30-08
By: Gregory Maguire
-
March
- By: Geraldine Brooks
- Narrated by: Richard Easton
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story "filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man" (Sue Monk Kidd). With "pitch-perfect writing" (USA Today), Brooks follows March as he leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause in the Civil War. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs.
-
-
Great book, greatly narrated
- By Paula on 07-30-06
By: Geraldine Brooks
-
The Passion
- By: Jeanette Winterson
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues, Daniel Pirrie
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meets their singular destiny.
-
-
Excellence.
- By Scottie V. on 10-07-19
-
Independent People
- By: Halldór Laxness
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 20 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
-
-
I am so confused about this introduction
- By George M on 09-10-18
By: Halldór Laxness
-
Chains
- The Seeds of America Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Laurie Halse Anderson
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As the Revolutionary War begins, 13-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate, become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion.
-
-
Fabulous!!!
- By Myrisha Goodson on 06-12-22
-
The Winthrop Woman
- By: Anya Seton
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 27 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1631 Elizabeth Winthrop, newly widowed with an infant daughter, set sail for the New World. Against a background of rigidity and conformity she dared to befriend Anne Hutchinson at the moment of her banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony; dared to challenge a determined army captain bent on the massacre of her friends, the Siwanoy Indians; and, above all, dared to love a man as her heart and her whole being commanded.
-
-
Historical Fiction that Aged Very Well
- By Lulu on 11-26-14
By: Anya Seton
-
The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 1: The Witness
- By: Sharon E. Foster
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Leading a small army of slaves, Nat Turner was a man born with a mission: to set the captives free. When words failed, he ignited an uprising that left over 50 whites dead. In the predawn hours of August 22, 1831, Nat Turner stormed into history with a Bible in one hand, brandishing a sword in the other. His rebellion shined a spotlight on slavery and the state of Virginia and divided a nation's trust. Turner himself became a lightning rod for abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and a terror and secret shame for slave owners.
-
-
Purchase and Download NOW!
- By Giselle E Ambursley on 03-03-16
By: Sharon E. Foster
-
Wolf Winter
- By: Cecilia Ekback
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms BlackAsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow.
-
-
So atmospheric, it hurts
- By Bookmarque on 08-24-15
By: Cecilia Ekback
-
Women of the Bible
- Abigail's Story
- By: Ann Burton
- Narrated by: Rachel Botchan
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ann Burton's critically acclaimed first novel in this compelling Biblical series tells the fictionalized tale of a young Jewish woman who makes pottery to support her family. But when her brother's huge gambling debt threatens to enslave them, she convinces his creditor to marry her and forgive the debt. After her husband sends her to manage his herds in the hills, Abigail grows fond of the rustic inhabitants - and of an enigmatic shepherd soldier who's on a collision course with her husband.
-
-
Wordy
- By Cayce on 07-26-07
By: Ann Burton
-
The Hundred Wells of Salaga
- A Novel
- By: Ayesha Harruna Attah
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that turns her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father's court. These two women's lives converge as infighting among Wurche's people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century. The Hundred Wells of Salaga offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.
-
Copper Sun
- By: Sharon M. Draper
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fifteen-year-old Amari witnesses the murder of her family and the destruction of her remote African village. She endures countless humiliations as she is beaten, branded, and forced to board a slave ship. The atrocities continue as she struggles through endless days of backbreaking work and daily degradation on a plantation.
-
-
Wonderful Story
- By Gabrielle on 04-05-11
By: Sharon M. Draper
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Train Dreams
- A Novella
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
-
-
2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
- By Louis on 06-20-12
By: Denis Johnson
-
All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
-
-
I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
-
The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
-
-
Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Runaway
- Stories
- By: Alice Munro
- Narrated by: Kymberly Dakin
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Three stories concern the same woman - in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. In these and other stories Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
-
-
Poor Audio Quality
- By David on 04-02-10
By: Alice Munro
-
The Vegetarian
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang
- Narrated by: Deborah Smith, Janet Song, Stephen Park
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law, and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her.
-
-
Pronunciation!
- By J L Pasricha on 03-20-16
By: Han Kang
-
10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
-
Train Dreams
- A Novella
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
-
-
2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
- By Louis on 06-20-12
By: Denis Johnson
-
All Aunt Hagar's Children
- Selected Stories
- By: Edward P. Jones
- Narrated by: James Peter Francis
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Returning to the city that inspired his first prize-winning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens.
-
-
I JUST DON'T KNOW ABOUT THIS!
- By Mimi Routh on 07-05-15
By: Edward P. Jones
-
The Savage Detectives
- A Novel
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: Eddie Lopez, Armando Durán
- Length: 26 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño has been called the García Marquez of his generation. The Savage Detectives is a hilarious and sexy, meandering and melancholy, companionable and complicated road trip through Mexico City, Barcelona, Israel, Liberia, and finally the desert of northern Mexico. It is the first of Bolaño's two giant works, with 2666, to be translated into English and is already being hailed as a masterpiece.
-
-
Bolaño Poetic Gyre
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-14
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Runaway
- Stories
- By: Alice Munro
- Narrated by: Kymberly Dakin
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Three stories concern the same woman - in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. In these and other stories Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
-
-
Poor Audio Quality
- By David on 04-02-10
By: Alice Munro
-
The Vegetarian
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang
- Narrated by: Deborah Smith, Janet Song, Stephen Park
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Before the nightmares began, Yeong-hye and her husband lived an ordinary, controlled life. But the dreams—invasive images of blood and brutality—torture her, driving Yeong-hye to purge her mind and renounce eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but it interrupts her marriage and sets into motion an increasingly grotesque chain of events at home. As her husband, her brother-in-law, and sister each fight to reassert their control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the choice that’s become sacred to her.
-
-
Pronunciation!
- By J L Pasricha on 03-20-16
By: Han Kang
-
10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
-
Persepolis
- The History and Legacy of the Ancient Persian Empire's Capital City
- By: Charles River Editors
- Narrated by: Scott Clem
- Length: 1 hr and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lying in the middle of a plain in modern-day Iran is a forgotten ancient city, Persepolis. Built two and a half thousand years ago, it was known in its day as the richest city under the sun. Persepolis was the capital of Persia, the largest empire the world had ever seen, but after its destruction, it was largely forgotten for nearly 2,000 years, and the lives and achievements of those who built it were almost entirely erased from history.
-
Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
- By: Tony Judt
- Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
- Length: 43 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world’s most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. Postwar is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through 34 nations and 60 years of political and cultural change—all in one integrated, enthralling narrative.
-
-
Great book, but not terrific listening
- By History on 10-18-11
By: Tony Judt
-
Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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".
-
-
Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
-
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
- Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
- By: Katherine Boo
- Narrated by: Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away.
-
-
An Antidote for Shantaram
- By Dr. on 06-14-12
By: Katherine Boo
-
Random Family
- Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx
- By: Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
- Narrated by: Roxana Ortega
- Length: 20 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her extraordinary best seller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses listeners in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances - Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George; and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar - Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies.
-
-
Speechless
- By Amazon Customer on 09-02-19
-
Citizen
- An American Lyric
- By: Claudia Rankine
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 1 hr and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Claudia Rankine's bold new audiobook recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV - everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.
-
-
Important Work But Audio Is Missing a Lot
- By David P on 08-30-17
By: Claudia Rankine
-
Hurricane Season
- By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabon, Ana Osorio
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
-
-
Wow
- By Anonymous User on 11-20-20
By: Fernanda Melchor, and others
-
The Argonauts
- By: Maggie Nelson
- Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making.
-
-
A relaxing meditation on identity, gender and art
- By redhidari on 10-01-15
By: Maggie Nelson
-
The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
-
-
Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
-
A Brief History of Seven Killings
- By: Marlon James
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean, Cherise Boothe, Dwight Bacquie, and others
- Length: 26 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner, The Man Booker Prize, 2015 Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters - assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts - A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s.
-
-
A Tough Read
- By KP on 05-07-16
By: Marlon James
-
We the Animals
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Frankie J. Alvarez
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
-
-
I want my credit back!
- By Van Gilder on 09-02-11
By: Justin Torres
-
Austerlitz
- By: W. G. Sebald
- Narrated by: Richard Matthews
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by "one of the most gripping writers imaginable" ( The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man's search for the answer to his life's central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him.
-
-
To each their own
- By Sebastian Romero on 04-23-20
By: W. G. Sebald
What listeners say about A Mercy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- Roxanne
- 05-27-09
Great story, but...
Author Toni Morrison has written a great book again. However, she is very difficult to listen to. Monotone voice, lacking in emotion. This book would have been much better served bay a narrator with acting experience. I am always wary of books read by the author, and this book certainly validated that wariness.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Alexis Rocha
- 09-09-20
beautiful
As always Toni Morrison crafted an incredibly beautiful story. the interview at the end was great
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- roger a barnes
- 02-17-24
The different lives of the characters
The author reads beautifully. Enjoyed the merging of the different lives, experiences and knowledge. The times it happens, the images my mind held. Always have enjoyed this author.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
- Pablo Tebas
- 01-18-09
Great book
Magnificent book from Toni Morrison. A story about love and betrayal in the late 1600s. A story told from multiple points of view. Morrison uses stream of consciousness for most of the book, what reminds me of Faulkner and "The Sound and The Fury". Not an easy book to read because until you finish it you really do not get the whole story: literally until the very last sentence of the novel.
I think this book is easier to read that to listen to, because each chapter is narrated by one character, and in the audiobook version the separation between chapters is not clear. Toni Morrison has a wonderful evocative voice, but she does not try to change it for each character of the novel, relying only for identification of each of them on the different way they express themselves. The makes the audition confusing, at least initially. I ended up reading the book on paper at the same time that I was listening to Toni Morrison's voice, and then I was completely hooked on the book.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
21 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Jerry Ingersoll
- 04-06-09
Beautiful story, beautiful read
Thank you Toni Morrison for writing this heart-wrenching yet beautiful story of these oh so real people. I have now a deeper understanding of slavery, and of loyalty. I listened twice and loved your voice. This is now on my list of favorites.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- doreen
- 08-04-14
Only Morrison's hypnotic voice would do...
What made the experience of listening to A Mercy the most enjoyable?
Morrison's command of voice, tone and timing is matched only by the compelling characters she so completely brings to life.
What did you like best about this story?
Genius to locate these characters in pre-America...imagining life before the colonies seems to give context to what came later...extraordinary.
Which character – as performed by Toni Morrison – was your favorite?
Sorrow!
If you could rename A Mercy, what would you call it?
Why rename it?
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- camargo
- 01-18-16
Masterfully narrated by its artful author
Incredibly beautiful, full of memorable scenes, colours, scents. Morrison encapsulates time and redesigns history with such passion that imagination flies away.
Múltiple narrators take turns to tell a story beyond themselves, a story that is about their lives but also about other people's lives. A daughter who can not forget abandonment and finds in devoted love a way out of her sadness, a mother who can not imagine a better world for her children and gives her daughter away to save her, a man whose home should tell the story of his sacrifice, a woman whose promised family abandons her too soon, a little girl who learns to love when she becomes a mother, a native woman who resists death and struggles for a future away from her own people, a man with healing powers who can save others but not his love. These characters sound profound, deeply human and notoriously kind. They fight a battle against disease, weather and the unkown. Above all, they fight for survival in a complex land, a territory that is vast and scattered with several different beliefs. Individually they are only orphans, astrays, solitary people; together they are capable of more, but to provenientes their worth they will hace to make huge sacrifice. A Mercy is a story about love, dignity and immense possibilities; it cherishes life and honors human bonds.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
- Suzn F
- 12-28-08
Oh, this book
Toni Morrison is one of my favorite authors. This story is stream of consciousness, poetry, beauty, horror, longing and sorrow. The characters have stayed with me. I was engaged and interested every moment. I truly loved this book.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
13 people found this helpful
-
Overall
- Elizabeth
- 02-21-09
Exquisite
Toni Morrison's language is exquisite; her characters heart-wrenching and her theme of betrayal universal. The interview with Ms. Morrison that follows the book is fascinating as she describes her exhaustive reasearch and personal motivation to write A Mercy. This is a book that will stay with me, read by one the world's great authors.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Mimi Routh
- 02-28-16
Let Toni's Voice and Story Carry You Away!
This book is a treasure, Great Literature, a thought-provoking three listens! It had a strange effect on me with Ms. Morrison's soft voice just taking me to that other place. Mind you, I was only knitting -- not driving a big-rig or watching little kids! I think someone driving would have difficulty listening to this because of the delicacy of the reading. That aside, yes, the book takes more than one listen to get the characters straight and begin to think about the whole thing. Don't anybody listen down to this black author! She is world class educated! This is so much more than a real grown-up chapter book to enthrall dipsticks who barely squeaked through high school! She has chosen every word carefully. Some intellectual authors enjoy writing puzzles diabolically intended to confuse. Not this author nor this book!. . . I had not thought of work situations being so fluid as they are in this book. There are jobs to be done, and many approaches. What we have is a small farm which needs to be kept up and many jobs done daily to make it produce. Who pulls weeds? Who milks the cow? Who starts the supper? These are all basically good people just trying to make their lives work. White indentured servants were also slaves in that their length of service could stretch for decades past the agreed time. They were out in the country with nobody to complain to. Half-grown girls and young women of all races were exploited, sheltered, helped and taught useful job skills. Oh, and given religious training which supplemented their tribal beliefs and psychotic delusions. The women in the story are white, Native American, black African, half black half white. There are pregnancies, burials, illnesses. Sometimes one character is pregnant and much later another character mentions the baby dying or else toddling about. . . . The free black blacksmith is fascinating -- a tall, confident man who knows how to do things! He knows folk medicine as well as true artistry with wrought iron. Prince Charming! A savior! I noticed recently that a sewing pattern company has come out with a long princess-cut coat with big lapels -- for men! In 1970's San Francisco, certain black men wore such coats with boots and hats trimmed with silver studs -- oh, my! The allure! But his devotion lies with no woman. . . . I enjoyed the scene in which a gay slave couple help another slave deliver her baby. Very nice, and as gay people are a percentage of any population . . . But enough! Get the book!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful