Gravel Heart
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Gravel Heart
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Narrated by:
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Damian Lynch
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah, read by Damian Lynch.
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a powerful story of exile, migration, and betrayal.
Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict—the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into dishevelled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence.
When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him—and about love, sex, and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah's most astonishing achievement.
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Kemal, scion of one of the city's wealthiest families, is about to become engaged to Sibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encounters Füsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once the long-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins to open between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbul bourgeosie - a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulent parties and clubs, society gossip, picnics, and mansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy of decay.
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5 out of 5 stars
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one of the very best I've ever heard
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 03-06-10
By: Orhan Pamuk, and others
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Shadow of a Century
- By: Jean Grainger
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 265
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 232
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 229
Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Loved this book!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-20
By: Jean Grainger
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The Island
- By: Victoria Hislop
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 88
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 82
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 82
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding plans a trip to her mother's childhood home in Plaka, Greece hoping to unravel Sofia's hidden past. Given a letter to take to Sofia's old friend, Fotini, Alexis is promised that through Fotini, she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the deserted island of Spinalonga—Greece's former leper colony. Fotini reveals the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war, and passion.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Will listen to it again someday
- By RN on 01-07-23
By: Victoria Hislop
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Marina and Lee
- The Tormented Love and Fatal Obsession Behind Lee Harvey Oswald's Assassination of John F. Kennedy
- By: Priscilla Johnson McMillan
- Narrated by: R.C. Bray, Joseph Finder
- Length: 24 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 79
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 69
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 69
Marina and Lee is one of the best and truest audiobooks about the Kennedy assassination. Priscilla Johnson McMillan came to the story with a unique knowledge of the two main characters. In the 1950s she knew Kennedy well for a time when he was hospitalized with Addison's disease. She talked to him frequently, brought him books, knew his wife, and formed a strong opinion of the sort of man he was. What is astonishing is that she also knew Lee Harvey Oswald.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Now I know why he did it
- By Rodd on 06-09-14
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 1,004
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 894
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 895
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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Philomena
- A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search
- By: Martin Sixsmith
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 922
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 837
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 833
Now a major motion picture directed by Stephen Frears ( The Queen, High Fidelity) and starring Judi Dench ( Skyfall, Notes on a Scandal) and Steve Coogan ( The Trip, Hamlet 2): the heartbreaking true story of an Irishwoman and the secret she kept for 50 years. When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a "fallen woman". Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very Moving Story
- By Cariola on 02-09-14
By: Martin Sixsmith
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The Schooldays of Jesus
- By: J. M. Coetzee
- Narrated by: James Cameron Stewart
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 37
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Story4 out of 5 stars 31
David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new town, Estrella. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog, Bolivar, to watch over him. But he'll be seven soon, and he should be at school. And so, with the guidance of the three sisters who own the farm where Simon and Ines work, David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance. It's here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky.
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2 out of 5 stars
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SEXUAL PERVERSION PRESENTED AS BRILLIANT
- By Amazon Customer on 09-29-18
By: J. M. Coetzee
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The Sunday Philosophy Club
- An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Davina Porter
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 931
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 607
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 601
New York Times best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith, winner of the first-ever Saga Award for Wit, has entertained millions with his beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency mysteries. Now this phenomenally popular author introduces a fresh series, brimming with the charm and humor his stable of dedicated fans can't get enough of.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Advice For Prospective Listeners
- By DCinMI on 02-18-13
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44 Scotland Street
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,792
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 1,422
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,418
The brilliant Alexander McCall Smith became an international sensation with his New York Times best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels. His award-winning wit, made famous through that series, is fully on display in 44 Scotland Street.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Smith's answer to Maupin
- By Amazon Customer on 10-23-05
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Infidel
- By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Narrated by: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,665
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,766
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 2,771
This New York Times best-seller is the astonishing life story of award-winning humanitarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A deeply respected advocate for free speech and women's rights, Hirsi Ali also lives under armed protection because of her outspoken criticism of the Islamic faith in which she was raised.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Tough, Candid Assessment
- By Paul Mullen on 02-18-08
By: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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The Heart's Invisible Furies
- A Novel
- By: John Boyne
- Narrated by: Stephen Hogan
- Length: 21 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7,055
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 6,415
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6,384
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding. A Must listen.
- By Keith G on 09-04-17
By: John Boyne
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The Imam's Daughter
- My Desperate Flight to Freedom
- By: Hannah Shah
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 59
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
Hannah Shah is an Imam's daughter. She lived the life of a devout Muslim in a family of Pakistani Muslims in England, but behind the front door, she was a caged butterfly. For many years, her father abused her in the cellar of their home. At 16, she discovered a plan to send her to Pakistan for an arranged marriage, and she gathered the courage to run away. Relentlessly hunted by her angry father and brothers, who were intent on executing an "honor" killing, she moved from house to house in perpetual fear to escape them.
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4 out of 5 stars
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only half of the story is in Audible!
- By ellen on 02-09-11
By: Hannah Shah
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Find Me Unafraid
- Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum
- By: Kennedy Odede, Jessica Posner
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson, Mandy Siegfried, P.J. Ochlan (foreword)
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 354
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 319
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 317
Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A difficult and rewarding listen
- By R. MCRACKAN on 08-23-18
By: Kennedy Odede, and others
-
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
- Stories
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Gideon, Piter Marek, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 155
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 133
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 135
In "Books and Roses", one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers' fates. In "Is Your Blood as Red as This?", an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" involves a "house of locks", where doors can be closed only with a key - with surprising unobservable developments. And in "If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think", a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
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5 out of 5 stars
-
clever
- By jared rogerson on 03-15-18
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Golden Earrings
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 20 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 533
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 487
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 483
Catalina, grand-daughter of Spanish refugees, is a disciplined student with the School of the Paris Opera Ballet. Little gets inthe way of her career until the visit of an otherworldly being, who leaves her a mysterious pair of golden earrings. Given a quest, Catalina realises she must explore her own Spanish heritage and makes the connection between the visitor and ‘La Rusa’, a young Andalusian flamenco star. La Rusa died in exile in Paris in 1952, her death ruled as suicide. But as Catalina begins to discover, there were those in the community, who had good reason for wanting La Rusa dead.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Fabulous story
- By Paddington on 10-19-12
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The Postcard
- By: Leah Fleming
- Narrated by: Elaine Claxton
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 172
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 156
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 160
2002, Australia. When Melissa discovers a postcard addressed to 'Desmond' among her recently deceased father's effects, she is determined to discover this person's identity and his relationship to her father. She soon embarks on a journey that will take her across oceans and into the past...
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3 out of 5 stars
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Meh
- By Summer Layne on 03-06-15
By: Leah Fleming
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 27
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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award, Paradise was characterized by the Nobel Prize committee as Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “breakthrough” work. It is at once the chronicle of an African boy’s coming-of-age, a tragic love story, and a tale of the corruption of African tradition by European colonialism.
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Abbas has never told anyone about his past—before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.
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When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of East Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back—until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Compelling book in every way
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 14
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He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite as he imagined—the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return, he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family. Twenty years later, the barriers come down in Zanzibar and he is able and compelled to go back.
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5 out of 5 stars
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WOW. Fantastic book; perfect narrator
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Memory of Departure
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 5
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 5
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Story4 out of 5 stars 5
Poverty and depravity wreak havoc on Hassan Omar’s family. Amid great hardship he decides to escape. The arrival of independence brings new upheavals as well as the betrayal of the promise of freedom. The new government, fearful of an exodus of its most able men, discourages young people from travelling abroad and refuses to release examination results. Deprived of a scholarship, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother’s rightful share of the family inheritance.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 9
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On a late November afternoon, Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from his native Zanzibar. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession—a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise, silence his only protection.
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5 out of 5 stars
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beautifully written and read
- By ana teresa blank on 03-30-24
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5 out of 5 stars
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When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of East Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back—until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya.
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He thinks, as he escapes from Zanzibar, that he will probably never return, and yet the dream of studying in England matters above that. Things do not happen quite as he imagined—the school where he teaches is cramped and violent, he forgets how it feels to belong. But there is Emma, beautiful, rebellious Emma, who turns away from her white, middle-class roots to offer him love and bear him a child. And in return, he spins stories of his home and keeps her a secret from his family. Twenty years later, the barriers come down in Zanzibar and he is able and compelled to go back.
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On a late November afternoon, Saleh Omar arrives at Gatwick Airport from his native Zanzibar. With him he has a small bag in which lies his most precious possession—a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture shop, have a house and be a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker from paradise, silence his only protection.
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Writing at the peak of his powers, Abdulrazak Gurnah gives us in Desertion a spellbinding novel of forbidden love and cultural upheaval, with consequences powerfully reverberating through three generations and across continents—from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence.
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Rich And Evocative Reading Experience!
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Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Curious and beautifully written
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Dottie
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 2
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 2
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Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history—or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain. At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie, lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs.
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 4
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Dear Catherine, he began. Here I sit, making a meal out of asking you to dinner. I don’t really know how to do it. To have cultural integrity, I would have to send my aunt to speak, discreetly, to your aunt, who would then speak to your mother, who would speak to my mother, who would speak to my father, who would speak to me and then approach your mother, who would then approach you. Demoralised by small persecutions and the squalor and poverty of his life, Daud takes refuge in his imagination.
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The Promise
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Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
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Excellent novel
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People of the Book
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This ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in 15th-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries.
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What listeners say about Gravel Heart
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Sheila S Sheehan
- 04-20-23
Don’t tire
Stay with this beautifully written story . Leave it aside if you must but return to its exquisite layers of compassion and insights . Bravo
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- S. Z. Sykes
- 04-26-24
So enjoyed this!
This transported me, delighted and inspired me. It was beautifully performed and makes me want to go read more of this author’s work. Asante!
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