-
Magic Seeds
- Narrated by: Aasif Mandvi
- Length: 9 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
Buy for $17.19
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- By: Mohsin Hamid
- Narrated by: Mohsin Hamid
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting.
-
-
Beautiful throughout
- By Richard Lee on 02-18-24
By: Mohsin Hamid
-
The Mimic Men
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Former government minister Ralph Singh is the perpetual outsider: displaced, disillusioned, and now living in exile, Ralph reflects on his earlier life and the searing effects of colonialism. Ralph's constant estrangement sees him ever attempting to fit into various communities, only to find home in more transient spaces. Born on the tropical island of Isabella, he is one of West India's many "Mimic Men".
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Half a Life
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portuguese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray.
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
- By: Mohsin Hamid
- Narrated by: Mohsin Hamid
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by an elite valuation firm. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his budding romance with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his relationship with Erica shifting.
-
-
Beautiful throughout
- By Richard Lee on 02-18-24
By: Mohsin Hamid
-
The Mimic Men
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Former government minister Ralph Singh is the perpetual outsider: displaced, disillusioned, and now living in exile, Ralph reflects on his earlier life and the searing effects of colonialism. Ralph's constant estrangement sees him ever attempting to fit into various communities, only to find home in more transient spaces. Born on the tropical island of Isabella, he is one of West India's many "Mimic Men".
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Enigma of Arrival
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 13 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of a writer's singular journey - from one place to another, from the British colony of Trinidad to the ancient countryside of England, and from one state of mind to another - is perhaps Naipaul's most autobiographical work. Yet it is also woven through with remarkable invention to make it a rich and complex novel.
-
-
A noveau novel
- By Chike M Nzerue on 05-02-20
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Girl with Seven Names
- A North Korean Defector’s Story
- By: Hyeonseo Lee, David John
- Narrated by: Josie Dunn
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told, 'the best on the planet'?
-
-
Did not like narrator
- By Linda H. Andreae on 10-09-19
By: Hyeonseo Lee, and others
-
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
- By: Alexander McCall Smith
- Narrated by: Lisette Lecat
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mma "Precious" Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, making her the only female detective in the country. At first, cases are hard to come by. But eventually, troubled people come to Precious with a variety of concerns. Potentially philandering husbands, seemingly schizophrenic doctors, and a missing boy who may have been killed by witch doctors all compel Precious to roam about in her tiny van, searching for clues.
-
-
Transcends its Genre
- By Gene on 12-07-03
-
A Town Like Alice
- By: Nevil Shute
- Narrated by: Robin Bailey
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jean Paget is just twenty years old and working in Malaya when the Japanese invasion begins. When she is captured she joins a group of other European women and children whom the Japanese force to march for miles through the jungle. While on the march, the group run into some Australian prisoners, one of whom, Joe Harman, helps them steal some food, and is horrifically punished by the Japanese as a result.
-
-
An all time favorite I have read many times...
- By Peyton on 03-16-10
By: Nevil Shute
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
-
-
The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
-
Lessons
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon McBurney
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
-
-
Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
- By Peggy M on 09-26-22
By: Ian McEwan
-
I Wonder as I Wander
- An Autobiographical Journey
- By: Langston Hughes, Arnold Rampersad
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from Arthur Koestler to Emma, the Black Mammy of Moscow.
-
-
The Writer
- By Marva on 08-10-14
By: Langston Hughes, and others
-
The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
-
-
a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
-
Jailbird
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: Richard Ferrone
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Walter Starbuck, a career humanist and eventual low-level aide in the Nixon White House, is implicated in Watergate and jailed, after which he (like Howard Campbell in Mother Night) works on his memoirs. Starbuck is innocent (his office was used as a base for the Watergate shenanigans of which he had no knowledge), and yet he is not innocent (he has collaborated with power unquestioningly and served societal order all his life). He represents another Vonnegut Everyman caught amongst forces he neither understands nor can defend.
-
-
a fool and his self respect are soon parted
- By Darwin8u on 11-18-16
By: Kurt Vonnegut
-
Gravel Heart
- By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Narrated by: Damian Lynch
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
So enjoyed this!
- By S. Z. Sykes on 04-26-24
-
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
- A Novel
- By: Arundhati Roy
- Narrated by: Arundhati Roy
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety - in search of meaning and of love.
-
-
Author narration does not work for me
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-17
By: Arundhati Roy
Publisher's summary
Willie Chandran feels as though the life he lives is not his own. When he moves to Berlin, his listlessness washes away in a flood of encouragement from his radically political sister. Inspired, he joins an underground liberation movement in India in an attempt to break the chains shackling the lower castes. But after years of revolution and incarceration, he grows disillusioned and returns to England, still hoping to find his true self.
A powerful tale of the search for identity, Magic Seeds emphatically reminds us why Naipaul is an icon of modern literature.
Critic reviews
"Naipaul...is a modern master of the multiple ironies of resentment, the claustrophobia of the margins. In a world in which terrorism continually haunts the headlines, Naipaul's work is indispensable." (Publishers Weekly)
Related to this topic
-
Put Out More Flags
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Upper-class scoundrel Basil Seal, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, creates havoc wherever he goes, much to the despair of the three women in his life - his sister, his mother, and his mistress. When Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for more action and adventure. So Basil follows the call to arms and sets forth to enjoy his finest hour - as a war hero. Basil's instincts for self-preservation come to the fore as he insinuates himself into the Ministry of Information and a little-known section of Military Security.
-
-
Wickedly Funny
- By Chelz on 07-25-19
By: Evelyn Waugh
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
-
-
Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
The Jewel in the Crown
- Raj Quartet
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the India of 1942, two rapes take place simultaneously - that of an English girl in Mayapore, and that of India by the British. In each, physical violence, racial animosity, the coercion of the weak by the strong all play their part, but playing a part too are love, affection, loyalty, and recognition that the last division of all to be overcome is the colour of the skin.
-
-
This is one to get
- By Jeremy on 10-28-14
By: Paul Scott
-
World’s End
- The Lanny Budd Novels, Book 1
- By: Upton Sinclair
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.
-
-
didn't finish
- By Bird Miller on 05-08-22
By: Upton Sinclair
-
Put Out More Flags
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Michael Maloney
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Upper-class scoundrel Basil Seal, mad, bad, and dangerous to know, creates havoc wherever he goes, much to the despair of the three women in his life - his sister, his mother, and his mistress. When Neville Chamberlain declares war on Germany, it seems the perfect opportunity for more action and adventure. So Basil follows the call to arms and sets forth to enjoy his finest hour - as a war hero. Basil's instincts for self-preservation come to the fore as he insinuates himself into the Ministry of Information and a little-known section of Military Security.
-
-
Wickedly Funny
- By Chelz on 07-25-19
By: Evelyn Waugh
-
A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this incandescent novel, V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man, an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.
-
-
Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
-
-
Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
-
The Jewel in the Crown
- Raj Quartet
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the India of 1942, two rapes take place simultaneously - that of an English girl in Mayapore, and that of India by the British. In each, physical violence, racial animosity, the coercion of the weak by the strong all play their part, but playing a part too are love, affection, loyalty, and recognition that the last division of all to be overcome is the colour of the skin.
-
-
This is one to get
- By Jeremy on 10-28-14
By: Paul Scott
-
World’s End
- The Lanny Budd Novels, Book 1
- By: Upton Sinclair
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first 13 years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious - but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end. When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him.
-
-
didn't finish
- By Bird Miller on 05-08-22
By: Upton Sinclair
-
The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
-
-
Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
-
The Cut Out Girl
- A Story of War and Family, Lost and Found
- By: Bart van Es
- Narrated by: Bart van Es
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bart van Es left Holland for England many years ago, but one story from his Dutch childhood never left him. It was a mystery of sorts: A young Jewish girl named Lientje had been taken in during the war by relatives and hidden from the Nazis, handed over by her parents. The girl had been raised by her foster family as one of their own, but then, well after the war, they were no longer in touch. What was the girl's side of the story, Bart wondered? What really happened during the war and after? So began an investigation that would consume Bart van Es's life and change it.
-
-
a powerful & unique work on the Holocaust
- By D. Littman on 03-06-19
By: Bart van Es
-
In the Light of What We Know
- By: Zia Haider Rahman
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
-
-
dreadful
- By sam on 06-05-15
-
The Night Ocean
- By: Paul La Farge
- Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Frustratingly Uneven Due to Clumsy Plot Structure
- By Adam on 06-15-17
By: Paul La Farge
-
Stasiland
- Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall
- By: Anna Funder
- Narrated by: Denica Fairman
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Stasiland, Anna Funder tells extraordinary stories of ordinary people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship, and of those who worked for its vicious secret police, the Stasi. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old was accused of trying to start World War III. She visits the regime’s cartographer, a man obsessed to this day with the Berlin Wall, then gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the east, once declared by the authorities “no longer to exist.”
-
-
A Great Achievement
- By Sil A. on 08-11-21
By: Anna Funder
-
The Quiet American
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Joseph Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Alden Pyle, an idealistic young American, is sent to Vietnam to promote democracy amidst the intrigue and violence of the French war with the Vietminh, while his friend, Fowler, a cynical foreign correspondent, looks on.
-
-
Terrible narrator nearly derails Greene novel.
- By Richard on 07-12-12
By: Graham Greene
-
All Our Names
- By: Dinaw Mengestu
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld, Korey Jackson
- Length: 8 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All Our Names is the story of a young man who comes of age during an African revolution, drawn from the hushed halls of his university into the intensifying clamor of the streets outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, and the path of revolution leads to almost certain destruction, he leaves behind his country and friends for America. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into the routines of small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past....
-
-
A Tale of Two Continents
- By David on 07-31-14
By: Dinaw Mengestu
-
Nine Continents
- A Memoir In and Out of China
- By: Xiaolu Guo
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Xiaolu Guo has traveled further than most to become who she needed to be. Now, as she experiences the birth of her daughter in a London maternity ward surrounded by women from all over the world, she looks back on that journey. It begins in the fishing village shack on the East China Sea where her illiterate grandparents raised her, and brings her to a rapidly changing Beijing, full of contradictions: a thriving underground art scene amid mass censorship, curious Westerners who held out affection only to disappear back home.
-
-
must read
- By Jeff Darlington on 10-22-17
By: Xiaolu Guo
-
Clara Callan
- By: Richard B. Wright
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey, Joanna P. Adler
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two sisters, small-town Ontario, 1934. Canadian author Richard Wright tells their story, from the ordinary to the extraoridinary with an eye for the commonplace and poignant sense of the larger undercurrents that change people's lives.
-
-
charming intimate refreshing
- By L on 09-10-04
-
Men at Arms
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Christian Rodska
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade that seriously blots his Halberdier copybook. Men at Arms is the first novel in Waugh's brilliant Sword of Honor trilogy recording the tumultuous wartime adventures of Guy Crouchback.
-
-
Supposedly Humorous
- By Kindle Customer on 11-13-18
By: Evelyn Waugh
-
Maeve's Times
- In Her Own Words
- By: Maeve Binchy
- Narrated by: Kate Binchy
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the royal wedding to boring airplane companions, Samuel Beckett to Margaret Thatcher, "senior moments" to life as a waitress, Maeve's Times gives us wonderful insight into a changing Ireland as it celebrates the work of one of our best-loved writers in all its diversity - revealing her characteristic directness, laugh-out-loud humor, and unswerving gaze into the true heart of a matter.
-
-
A GLIMPSE THROUGH MAEVE'S LOOKING GLASS
- By jstrfic on 08-08-17
By: Maeve Binchy
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
-
-
Mixed feelings.
- By anton on 10-27-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
-
Pretty Good
- By Joan on 09-23-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
An Area of Darkness
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.
-
-
Go slowly with this one, or it's a slog
- By John S. on 08-15-21
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
-
-
Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
Miguel Street
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
-
-
Mixed feelings.
- By anton on 10-27-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
A Way in the World
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories, A Way in the World tells intersecting stories whose protagonists include the disgraced and half-demented Sir Walter Raleigh, who seeks El Dorado in the New World; the 19th-century insurgent Francisco Miranda, who becomes entangled in his own fantasies and borrowed ideas; and the doomed Blair, a present-day Caribbean revolutionary stranded in East Africa.
-
-
ugh!
- By Norman Johnson on 09-16-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
-
-
Pretty Good
- By Joan on 09-23-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
-
In a Free State
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Neil Shah, Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On a road trip through Africa, two English people - Bobby, a civil servant with a guilty appetite for African boys; and Linda, a supercilious "compound wife" - are driving back to their enclave after a stay in the capital. But in between lies the landscape of an unnamed country whose squalor and ethnic bloodletting suggest Idi Amin's Uganda. And the farther Naipaul's protagonists travel into it, the more they find themselves crossing the line that separates privileged outsiders from horrified victims.
-
-
Magical Prose …
- By Saman on 07-19-18
By: V. S. Naipaul
What listeners say about Magic Seeds
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- DCRG
- 11-11-16
Smoking?
Would you be willing to try another book from V.S. Naipaul? Why or why not?
Yes. Hoping to get a broader view of life in Africa.
Would you be willing to try another one of Aasif Mandvi’s performances?
Probably not. It was very distracting. I kept having the feeling that he was smoking while reading. At least that's the way it sounded.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
- Alison
- 02-22-05
Read Half a Life first
This book completes the story begun in Naipaul's _Half a Life_, and I don't think the book stands very well on its own. It would be best to listen to the first book before tackling this one.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
23 people found this helpful