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A Prayer for Owen Meany
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 27 hrs and 19 mins
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Publisher's summary
Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)
Of all of John Irving's books, this is the one that lends itself best to audio. In print, Owen Meany's dialogue is set in capital letters; for this production, Irving himself selected Joe Barrett to deliver Meany's difficult voice as intended.
In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys – best friends – are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary and terrifying.
As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of John Irving's book, you'll also get an exclusive Jim Atlas interview that begins when the audiobook ends.
Why we think it's a great listen: For 20 years, John Irving believed that his ambitious novel could never be adequately executed in audio – and then he met narrator Joe Barrett.... In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys - best friends - are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument.
This production is part of our Audible Modern Vanguard line, a collection of important works from groundbreaking authors.
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Critic reviews
Editor's Pick
They said it couldn’t be done in audio. Wrong!
"I read A Prayer for Owen Meany when it published in 1989. For (almost) my entire career in audio, I couldn’t recommend a performance of the audiobook; other publishers thought the distinctive VOICE of Owen Meany to be impossible to render in our format. Joe Barrett proves them wrong. I highly (and at long last) recommend Joe Barrett’s narration of the humor and heartbreak in this epic coming-of-age story."
—Christina H., Audible Editor
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- By Julie W. Capell on 02-07-16
By: Nell Zink
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Full Circle
- By: Michael Thomas Ford
- Narrated by: Blake Somerset
- Length: 17 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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History professor Ned Brummel is living happily with his partner of 12 years in small-town Maine when he receives a phone call from his estranged friend - Jack - telling him that another friend - Andy - is very ill and possibly near death. As Ned boards a plane to Chicago on his way to his friend's bedside, he embarks on another journey into memory, examining the major events and small moments that have shaped his world and his relationships with these two very different, very important men.
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To Every Season...
- By Donald on 10-01-13
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Liberating Paris
- A Novel
- By: Linda Bloodworth Thomason
- Narrated by: Cynthia Darlow
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Woodrow McIlmore, the town's golden boy and local gynecologist, is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart, Milan, and seems by all appearances to be leading the perfect life with his two children and extended family and friends. But when Wood's daughter announces that she is smitten with a college classmate and intends to marry him, her parents are stunned.
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Deeply moving, a great listen
- By Cynthia on 11-27-05
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Shadow Show
- All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury
- By: Sam Weller - editor, Mort Castle - editor
- Narrated by: George Takei, Edward Herrmann, Kate Mulgrew, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ray Bradbury - peerless storyteller, poet of the impossible, and one of America's most beloved authors - is a literary giant whose remarkable career spanned seven decades. Now 26 of today's most diverse and celebrated authors offer new short works in honor of the master; stories of heart, intelligence, and dark wonder from a remarkable range of creative artists.
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THE MAN WHO FORGOT RAY BRADBURY
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 05-27-17
By: Sam Weller - editor, and others
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After the Parade
- By: Lori Ostlund
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Sensitive, big-hearted, and achingly self-conscious, 40-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confines of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After 20 years under the Pygmalion-like direction of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to stop letting life happen to him and to take control of his own fate.
By: Lori Ostlund
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The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Marina Willett, MD, has a problem. Her husband, Charlie, has become obsessed with H. P. Lovecraft, in particular with one episode in the legendary horror writer's life: In the summer of 1934, the "old gent" lived for two months with a gay teenage fan named Robert Barlow, at Barlow's family home in central Florida. What were the two of them up to? Were they friends - or something more? Just when Charlie thinks he's solved the puzzle, a new scandal erupts, and he disappears.
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Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
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Charms for the Easy Life
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Kate Fleming
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful charms to ward off loneliness, despair, and the human misery that often beats a path to their door. And they are protected by the eccentric wisdom and muscular love of the remarkable matriarch Charlie Kate, a solid, uncompromising, self-taught healer who treats everything from boils to broken bones to broken hearts.
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So Lovely!
- By Doodle slave on 01-04-17
By: Kaye Gibbons
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Driving on the Rim
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
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Delightful
- By Roy on 01-05-11
By: Thomas McGuane
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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How to Survive a Summer
- A Novel
- By: Nick White
- Narrated by: Michael Crouch
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Grad student Will Dillard has largely buried memories of the summer he spent at a camp intended to "cure" homosexuality. But when he finds out a horror movie based on the camp is hitting theaters, he's forced to face his past - and his role in another camper's death. As he recounts the events surrounding his "failed rehabilitation", Will strikes out on an impromptu road trip back home to Mississippi, eventually returning to the abandoned campgrounds to solve the mysteries of that pivotal summer.
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A story full of heart and healing
- By ZippyBippy on 05-06-18
By: Nick White
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All Tom’s friends really are superheroes. There’s the Ear, the Spooner, the Impossible Man. Tom even married a superhero, the Perfectionist. But at their wedding, the Perfectionist was hypnotized (by ex-boyfriend Hypno, of course) to believe that Tom is invisible. Nothing he does can make her see him. Six months later, she’s sure that Tom has abandoned her. So she’s moving to Vancouver.
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Irving Out of the Park!
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TMI
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The Ultimate Classics Collection – Volume One: 15 Novels from Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, Brontë, & More
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The Ultimate Classics Collection: Volume One is a continent-hopping, century-spanning collection of 15 essential classic novels by British, American, and Russian authors, read by a cast of incredible narrators including Stephen Fry, Jason Isaacs, Adjoa Andoh, David Rintoul, and many more. Included here are stories by some of the greatest writers of all time, including Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Charles Dickens; Franz Kafka; Herman Melville; Leo Tolstoy, amongst a host of others.
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The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
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Read this book if your heart is made of steal
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
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A Fine Balance
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- By: Rohinton Mistry
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- Original Recording
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A compelling dramatisation of Rohinton Mistry's Booker Prize-nominated novel about India's underclass. India, 1975. Desperate to preserve her independence from her abusive brother, Parsi widow Dina Dilal turns her cramped city apartment into a sweatshop. But when her eyesight begins to fail, she hires two tailors - uncle and nephew Ishvar and Om, who have fled from caste violence in their native village. She also takes in a lodger - Maneck, a reluctant student from the mountains.
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Bravo for FINE BALANCE
- By Anonymous User on 11-26-22
By: Rohinton Mistry
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The Poisonwood Bible
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The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
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Listen to the sample first!
- By Cheryl D on 07-30-08
What listeners say about A Prayer for Owen Meany
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rebecca
- 03-20-17
Outstanding
I LOVED this book. I have many many audio books. This has got to be one of the best ever...I have just finished it and I am already missing Owen and the other characters. Engrossing, and life affirming, I can not recommend enough........
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3 people found this helpful
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- JDavidI
- 10-09-15
Absolute Genius!
A Prayer For Owen Meany, although set in the 50"s through the 80's, has undercurrents and messages that are certainly applicable to today. Irving tells the story beautifully in first-person, through his protagonist, John Wheelwright. The cast of characters, quirky and flawed, is so clearly drawn. The flaws make the human and believable. I will miss these characters for quite some time
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jeff
- 04-25-12
HILARIOUS NARRATION
I just finished this and Ill tell you, it was hard to finish the book BEFORE writing the review.The narration alone is worth the cost of admission. Sometimes its hard to imagine just reading the book when you get narration like this. Barrett does an amazing job of the voices of Owen and the grandmother.I often found myself laughing out-loud
. The book lags a bit in the middle, and for me it would have been much better if it was tightened up,.but its worth persevering to get to the end, which is very good. All in all its a rich rewarding read involving every emotion.
John Irving is BRILLIANT at exploring people, lives, and time periods from his utterly rich, unique,and mature vantage point .No one writes like him, or could write like him for that matter. I think he is a very brave writer who is willing to take great chances with his story's. What transpires from his brilliance, courage and originality is always something very special and worthy of your time. His books make the best book club selections because there are so many layers and areas to explore. The smarter you are, the more you will get out of his work.
SPOILER ALERT= DONT LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW THAT COMES WITH THIS PURCHASE TILL YOUR FINISHED READING THE BOOK.
As a side note, I enjoyed the fact that parts of the book take place in Toronto, since that's where I live .
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- Trey Weller
- 08-10-15
A Modern Classic with a Phenomenal Voice
Where does A Prayer for Owen Meany rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
In the top five. And that's not just because the book by John Irving is a wonderful, spellbinding read. Joe Barrett is a narrator who is perfectly matched to the material.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The titular Owen Meany is at the novel's center, and provides an absolutely enchanting focus point for the narrative.
What does Joe Barrett bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
I had some reservations going in about my tolerance for Owen Meany's "wrecked" voice. How would I manage to listen to it on and off for more than a day's worth of audiobook? Joe Barrett gives Owen a voice that is distinctive, vaguely unpleasant, and yet something I was still able to listen to. Barrett's Owen is now the Owen I hear in my head when I think of the book, and that's a major accomplishment.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
A Prayer for Owen Meany might make you cry (it did me). It will definitely make you laugh. John Irving has a talent for the sort of elaborately set up farce I can't get enough of, and a production of the Nativity around the novel's midpoint provides seemingly endless material-- a funnier pageant than the one in Bless Me, Ultima, and that's saying something.
Any additional comments?
If you haven't read it before, read it now. And Barrett's sublime performance is worth getting the audiobook.
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- Phil Johnson
- 06-01-13
One of my my all time favorites.
#1 Aud Bks: T Help, T Darling, All D Sedaris A Prayer for O Meany All G Flynn Lang. of Bees Bel Canto 11/22/63 H2O fr Elephants Dog Stars Pi
The list above notes my favorite audio books, limited to 140 characters. I would like to add more, and also add a short list of what I did not like (particularly Ken Follett) so that fellow scanners of reviews would have a quick sense of whether to follow a particular reviewers myriad thoughts.
As for Owen Meany, I had read the book twice before I listened to it, which I have now done twice.
It swept me away. John Irving has his quirks, but the compassion in this book is quite moving. Most highly recommended.
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- Jrothbardt
- 12-11-15
Excellent narration and classic story
The narrator brings the"Voice" of Owen to life. A compelling story that my husband recommended as it was one of his favorites. John Irving doesn't disappoint.
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- Jeff Page
- 09-20-15
Recommended without reservation.
A coming of age story on par with Huckleberry Finn. I laughed, I cried, and I fell in love with Owen Meany.
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- cobugi
- 09-20-14
It gave me the shivers.
What did you love best about A Prayer for Owen Meany?
This book wasn't like any other I have listened to, or read. It took me a while to start getting into it but I am so glad I did. I was annoyed by Owen through most of the book, and I was curious becauseI did not know how the protagonist felt about him either! I wasn't sure about how I felt about the book through most of it, for that matter. All this talk about religion... I really wasn't sure about how everything was meant to come together. But it did indeed. This book is intriguing and the characters so distinct. John Irving is so clever, I just love it.
What about Joe Barrett’s performance did you like?
Outstanding performance.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Towards the end of the book, when everything starts to definitively come together. I cannot say any more without spoiling it.
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- Anthony A. Heying
- 08-27-14
This is a very funny book
What made the experience of listening to A Prayer for Owen Meany the most enjoyable?
The entire story, while lengthy is captivating.
Who was your favorite character and why?
The Principle character Owen Meany
Have you listened to any of Joe Barrett’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
None
Any additional comments?
I loved the book and I'll listen to another of the authors tomes to compare
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- Kindle Customer Hazel
- 11-15-16
A Prayer for Owen Meany
It's a very powerful story. I think that I would have missed some subtleties if I had not read the book first.
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