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Kindred
- Narrated by: Kim Staunton
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
The first science-fiction written by a Black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of African-American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity.
Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life.
During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she's been given: to protect this young slaveholder until he can father her own great-grandmother.
Author Octavia E. Butler skilfully juxtaposes the serious issues of slavery, human rights, and racial prejudice with an exciting science-fiction, romance, and historical adventure. Kim Staunton's narrative talent magically transforms the listener's earphones into an audio time machine.
Critic reviews
"[Kindred] is a shattering work of art with much to say about love, hate, slavery and racial dilemmas, then and now." (Los Angeles Herald Examiner)
"Truly terrifying." (Essence)
"Butler's literary craftsmanship is superb." (The Washington Post Book World)
Featured Article: Who's the best? Rediscover the greatest, most notable American writers of all time
To curate a list of famous American writers who are also considered among the best American authors, a few things count: current ratings for their works, their particular time periods in history, critical reception, their prevalence in the 21st century, and yes, the awards they won. Many of these authors are taught in school today. From Hemingway to Harper Lee, these famous American authors are all worthy of enduring recognition—and a fresh listen!
![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/Audible/en_US/images/creative/Melissa_B_360x360._CB1525375919_.png)
Editor's Pick
Shakes you to your bones
"I approached Kindred about a year ago knowing it was a classic. I don’t usually do well with classics—I get impatient with old-fashioned language and plodding plots—but this wasn’t like that at all. I was thrown off my expectations from chapter one. This story is gripping and fast-paced and uncomfortable and every bit as genius as when it was first released forty years ago. Listening with Kim Staunton’s narration made it, if possible, even more hauntingly real. This one stays with you."
—Melissa B., Audible Editor
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By: Rosanne Bittner
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Freedom Road
- By: Howard Fast
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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It was everywhere. You couldn’t talk about the revolution without using the word freedom in the same breath. But Gideon Jackson knew that freedom meant something different if your skin was black. Fast’s fictional account of the post Civil War era takes us into the life of Gideon Jackson, a black man, newly freed, and determined to make a difference.
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Great Story, Decent Narrator
- By Keon Gardner on 12-04-17
By: Howard Fast
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Last Town on Earth
- By: Thomas Mullen
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Last Town on Earth centers on the inhabitants of a small logging town in Washington and what happens when they take drastic measures (quarantine) to try and protect themselves from the virulent and deadly flu epidemic of 1918. When a deserting WWI soldier demands sanctuary, events are set in motion that change the town forever.
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Thrill for a Reader. Model for a Writer
- By Angela on 03-04-11
By: Thomas Mullen
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Facets
- By: Barbara Delinsky
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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" Facets pits the arrogant, self-centered John against the newly vengeful Hillary, the creative and sensitive Pamela, and the doggedly self-made Cutter. Spanning three decades, Facets is as much a family drama as any I've ever written. My writing style may have changed since 1990, but the heart and soul of my characters have not. Please enjoy Facets as much as I did then - and do now."
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not a great read (or listen)
- By Nicole Warn on 06-30-21
By: Barbara Delinsky
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Going to Meet the Man
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water.
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Punch in the gut
- By Rebecca on 05-08-17
By: James Baldwin
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Peyton Place
- By: Grace Metalious
- Narrated by: Tim O'Connor
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1956, when this novel was first published, communities all over New England snapped up copies to see if they were the town portrayed in the book. Peyton Place is the story of a repressive New England town known for its high standards of public morality, and the steamy sexual activities that take place behind its bedroom doors.
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Best book I've read to date!
- By Crusader on 11-07-11
By: Grace Metalious
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My Soul to Keep
- By: Tananarive Due
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James
- Length: 18 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.
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A Book I Can't Keep
- By Mistsofjade on 07-19-20
By: Tananarive Due
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Out of the Darkness
- The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson
- By: Eric A. Shelman
- Narrated by: Deb Thomas
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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In New York City, in April of 1874, a most unusual event took place. A severely abused nine-year-old girl named Mary Ellen Wilson became the first child in America to be rescued from an abusive home. She had been beaten, burned, slashed with scissors, locked in a closet, and had never been outside of her tenement home in over 7 years. Thanks to the concern and dedication of a missionary named Etta Wheeler, the child was finally saved from her cruel captors.
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Harrowing Story
- By musa on 03-21-17
By: Eric A. Shelman
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For the Roses
- Claybornes' Brides, Book 1
- By: Julie Garwood
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 22 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The Clayborne brothers were a rough gang of street urchins - until they found an abandoned baby girl in a New York City alley, named her Mary Rose, and headed to Blue Belle, Montana, to raise her to be a lady. They became a family - held together by loyalty and love, if not blood - when suddenly a stranger threatened to tear them apart.
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Beautiful Story
- By 🌸DARA on 12-14-13
By: Julie Garwood
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Copper Sun
- By: Sharon M. Draper
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Wonderful Story
- By Gabrielle on 04-05-11
By: Sharon M. Draper
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Wife of the Gods
- A Novel
- By: Kwei Quartey
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Detective Inspector Darko Dawson, a good family man and a remarkably intuitive sleuth, is sent to the village of Ketanu---the site of his mother's disappearance many years ago---to solve the murder of an accomplished young AIDS worker. While battling his own anger issues and concerns for his ailing son, Darko explores the motivations and secrets of the residents of Ketanu.
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Engrossing Mystery in a Fascinating Setting
- By Tracey Rains on 04-19-10
By: Kwei Quartey
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God's Handmaiden
- By: Gilbert Morris
- Narrated by: Christine Rendel
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Gervase Howard is in her mid-teens when her working-class mother dies and she must go to live with relatives in service to a wealthy, noble family, outside of London. While learning various jobs, she is drawn to the eldest son, Davis. Her fascination with him grows deeper, but more hopeless, since the two are separated not just by class, but also by Davis's love for Roberta. When Davis announces his engagement, he asks Gervase to join them as Roberta's maid. But instead Gervase becomes a companion to Florence Nightingale and accompanies her when the Crimean War breaks out....
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Always enjoy Gilbert Morris-Great historical fict.
- By Linda - Yakima on 01-17-13
By: Gilbert Morris
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When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent alien race—intervened in the fate of the humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth—but salvation comes at a price.
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When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.
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Anwuli Okwudili prefers to be called AO. To her, these initials have always stood for Artificial Organism. AO has never really felt...natural, and that's putting it lightly. Her parents spent most of the days before she was born praying for her peaceful passing because even in-utero she was "wrong". But she lived. Then came the car accident years later that disabled her even further. Yet instead of viewing her strange body the way the world views it, as freakish, unnatural, even the work of the devil, AO embraces all that she is.
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Slow audio speed to 0.9x
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Beloved
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Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Author-read Books
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By: Toni Morrison
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Ceremony
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Worth a re-read
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In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili - the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love - into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body - as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet.
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Salt Roads
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Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
- A Novel
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- Unabridged
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In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A 30-something-year-old “millennial everywoman”, she has recently left her white-collar desk job - in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time - as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women - alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her.
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This is not a novel.
- By Anonymous User on 02-17-21
By: Cho Nam-Joo, and others
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Falling in Love with Hominids
- By: Nalo Hopkinson
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
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In this long-awaited collection, Hopkinson continues to expand the boundaries of culture and imagination. Whether she is retelling The Tempest as a new Caribbean myth, filling a shopping mall with unfulfilled ghosts, or herding chickens that occasionally breathe fire, Hopkinson continues to create bold fiction that transcends boundaries and borders.
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Wonderful and Creative
- By Dee in Philly on 05-06-24
By: Nalo Hopkinson
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Miss Pearly's Girls
- By: ReShonda Tate Billingsley
- Narrated by: Patricia R. Floyd
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- Unabridged
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Raising four very different daughters on her own in rural Arkansas wasn't easy for Miss Pearly Bell. And she's always regretted that the sisters went their separate ways for good - and never wanted to see each other again. But when Pearly is stricken with a terminal illness, she summons them all home - determined to somehow help them get right with each other and forgive.... But that means dealing with past secrets and lies first.
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Felt like family
- By Gregory Cody on 04-16-22
What listeners say about Kindred
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jefferson
- 12-05-10
The Past of Slavery Still Moves and Wounds Us
Octavia Butler's Kindred is a terrible, fascinating, and moving novel, so vivid in its examination of the Southern slave system and its negative effects on slaves (especially) and masters (subtly). Butler puts her protagonist Dana Franklin, a contemporary African American woman, into incredibly difficult physical, moral, and existential situations via time travel to the antebellum Maryland plantation of her ancestors. Although there is no scientific explanation for the time travel, Butler's depiction of life on a slave plantation is convincingly detailed and realistic.
Kim Staunton does a marvelous job reading Kindred. Her natural voice is just right for Dana's warm, thoughtful, and honest first-person narration. Staunton effortlessly reads the voices of various characters, from an educated Southern Californian black woman of the 1970s to a Maryland slave or slave-owner of the early 19th century. There are moments of intense suspense and horrific violence, as well as moments of melting kindness and (nearly) redemptive understanding.
That I, a white man, had no trouble empathizing and identifying with Butler's black, female protagonist narrator Dana, but that I also uncomfortably found myself thinking that I would probably be at least as bad a master as Rufus Weylin, agreeing with Dana's white husband that life for the slaves on the Weylin plantation was not as bad as it could be (which meant that I was to some degree taking too lightly their pain living it), and longing for an impossibly happy ending, all testify to Butler's skill as a writer.
This book should be read by anyone who thinks that slavery really wasn't so bad after all or that the past is past. It should be read by anyone who wants to experience a powerful and absorbing story read by an excellent actress-reader.
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157 people found this helpful
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- Kelly
- 05-01-19
A lovely book about a horrific period of history
This book was a wonderful surprise and I listened to the entire thing in one day. I couldn't stop listening. Here is the thing about me, as a reader: I dislike science fiction. So, I was a bit worried when it was chosen as a BOTM by one of my groups. But, this book was wonderful.
Dana, a modern (1976) African-American woman, finds herself travelling through time to visit a young boy named Rufus. It is 1819, and Rufus is a white son of a slave-owner in the deep South. Dana believes that she can influence Rufus to be a better man than his father. Each time Rufus is in physical danger Dana finds herself back in time, where Rufus has continued to age. Each time she herself is in physical danger she returns home. Dana is married to a white man who also finds himself with her on one occasion.
The book is wonderful for its commentary on the human condition, and particularly on that of slaves. It is a historical fiction book that has a subtle story of science fiction, which works well for me. If you are looking for more science in your SciFi you may not like this one.
I saw that some reviewers complained about the implausibility of Dana's ease in adjusting to her role in 1819. The complaints have merit, but the issue didn't keep me from enjoying the book in any way. For me the book was about relationships between people. It was about how racism is learned and how people can be saved from hatred by love.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Jim Genzano
- 10-01-15
everyone should read kindred
such an important, powerful, harrowing book. still as timely now as ever. should be required reading for every American
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- AnneMichelle
- 10-16-09
GREAT BOOK!
I could hardly put it down. This story is so believable in so many ways, it truly makes one think about the way we see the past. Loved it!
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- Philip L. Rugejones
- 09-24-16
Great premise well executed.
very good read. the premise was fascinating. feel like it gave me new incites into slavery.
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- Dubi
- 06-30-20
Outlandish
One of the great unexpected decisions Octavia Butler made in structuring Kindred is to explain the science fiction-y elements of the story very early on rather than saving them for late reveals. That enables her to focus more closely on the subject matter at hand -- American slavery in the first half of the 19th century -- rather than speculative gimmicks.
So it's no spoiler to say that Dana, an African American writer in 1976 married to a white man, gets unstuck in time (without any technical explanation) in order to go back and save Rufus, a white boy who she quickly figures out is an ancestor of hers. Though he is a reprehensible product of his life as the son of a plantation slaver (and later the slaver himself), she has to make sure he lives to produce the child that will keep the family line intact.
But that's just your framing device. The most of it is how a modern day black woman reacts to suddenly living for various stretches of time in a slave state -- she is not always a slave herself, and she gets respite in periodically returning to her own time and sometimes her husband is there with her, but Butler devotes almost all of Kindred to depicting the lives of slaves and their enslavers in 1815 Maryland.
It is a life that, even though not depicted too graphically by Butler, was just outlandish in every way, even evoking some sadness that someone like Rufus could be so horribly corrupted by that culture. Amid the unspeakable tragedies that were slavery as it was, there is the unmistakable parallel Butler makes between Rufus's corruptibility then and the legacy we are left with today that is rearing its ugly head again.
Outlandish, yes it was, yes it is still -- not Outlandish as in resembling the similarly timebending historical series Outlander, because Kindred came first. The forthcoming movie Antebellum appears to be based on the same idea as Kindred, but the few images that can be seen in the trailer show a much different set of details.
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- Isabel
- 02-04-17
Fantastic story!!
As a fiction/paranormal fan, I'm glad to read a book of this genre about the lives of African Americans!! Great work!!
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- Munoz family
- 10-21-16
Excellent
What an amazing book. Makes you think about how much AND also how little times have changed. I kept thinking how although we are in better times, atrocities still occur in many parts of our world. People haven't changed, only consequences, education and order have improved. Scary.
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- Georgia Burns
- 04-10-23
I Chose this book because of Parable of the Sower
…a book that still haunts me. This was a worthy story, especially due to the vivid portrayal of slavery in all its ugliness. The narrator seemed to be reading to children which was a detraction for me. Parable of the Sower seems richer and more mature. Butler hit her stride with that one.
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- Andrew
- 09-25-18
The book is very interesting and shocking.
Very detail to a harsh history. The story is very interesting. Although the ending wasn't the best I can see why It had to end that way. Totally recommend the book.
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