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The Sea
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's summary
The author of The Untouchable (“contemporary fiction gets no better than this”—Patrick McGrath, The New York Times Book Review) now gives us a luminous novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory.
The narrator is Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who, soon after his wife’s death, has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child—a retreat from the grief, anger, and numbness of his life without her. But it is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled vacationing family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. The seductive mother; the imperious father; the twins—Chloe, fiery and forthright, and Myles, silent and expressionless—in whose mysterious connection Max became profoundly entangled, each of them a part of the “barely bearable raw immediacy” of his childhood memories. Interwoven with this story are Morden’s memories of his wife, Anna—of their life together, of her death—and the moments, both significant and mundane, that make up his life now: his relationship with his grown daughter, Claire, desperate to pull him from his grief; and with the other boarders at the house where he is staying, where the past beats inside him “like a second heart.”
What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, vividly dramatic, beautifully written novel—among the finest we have had from this extraordinary writer.
Critic reviews
“Remarkable. . . . The power and strangeness and piercing beauty of [The Sea is] a wonder.” —The Washington Post Book World
“With his fastidious wit and exquisite style, John Banville is the heir to Nabokov. . . . The Sea [is] his best novel so far.” —The Sunday Telegraph
“A gem. . . . [The sea] is a presence on every page, its ceaseless undulations echoing constantly in the cadences of the prose. This novel shouldn't simply be read. It needs to be heard, for its sound is intoxicating. . . . A winning work of art.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
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- By Darwin8u on 04-01-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Life Class
- By: Pat Barker
- Narrated by: Russell Boulter
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spring of 1914, a group of young students gather in an art studio for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant and Elinor Brooke are two components of a love triangle, and at the outset of the war, they turn to each other. After volunteering for the Red Cross, Paul must confront the fact that life, love, and art will never be the same for him.
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In Love and War
- By Cariola on 07-28-09
By: Pat Barker
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Lionel Asbo
- State of England
- By: Martin Amis
- Narrated by: Alex Jennings
- Length: 9 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious "Anti-Social Behaviour Order"), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine. He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality. Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love .
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Jēz...us! Just don't buy it for your Grans.
- By Darwin8u on 01-03-13
By: Martin Amis
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Fludd
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin - or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action.
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Small, tight irreverant novel that wryly inverts
- By Darwin8u on 07-21-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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The White Woman on the Green Bicycle
- By: Monique Roffey
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A beautifully written, unforgettable novel of a troubled marriage, set against the lush landscape and political turmoil of Trinidad. Monique Roffey's Orange Prize-shortlisted novel is a gripping portrait of post-colonialism that stands among great works by Caribbean writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Andrea Levy. When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England, George is immediately seduced by the beguiling island, while Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill-at-ease.
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Disappointing.
- By Crystal on 10-31-12
By: Monique Roffey
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The Swimming Pool Library
- By: Alan Hollinghurst
- Narrated by: Samuel West
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This novel centres on the friendship of William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and the elderly Lord Nantwich, who is searching for someone to write his biography.
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Strong stuff
- By Peregrine on 05-15-11
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Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English
- By: Natasha Solomons
- Narrated by: James Adams
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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At the start of World War II, Jack and Sadie Rosenblum flee Berlin for London with their baby daughter, Elizabeth. Upon arrival, Jack receives a pamphlet from the German Jewish Aid Committee on how to act like a proper Englishman. He follows it to the letter -Saville Row suits, the BBC, trips to Covent Garden, a Jaguar - and it works like a charm. The Rosenblums settle into a prosperous new life.
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Endearing
- By Emily on 09-09-11
By: Natasha Solomons
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The Distant Hours
- By: Kate Morton
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 22 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Edie Burchill and her mother have never been close, but when a long lost letter arrives one Sunday afternoon with the return address of Milderhurst Castle, Kent, printed on its envelope, Edie begins to suspect that her mother’s emotional distance masks an old secret.
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Right Mood At The Right Time
- By Simone on 11-13-12
By: Kate Morton
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A Golden Age
- A Novel
- By: Tahmima Anam
- Narrated by: Madhur Jaffrey
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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As young widow Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming, her children are almost grown, and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air.
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sad, poignant, thought-provoking, beautiful
- By Rio Delta Wild on 06-04-08
By: Tahmima Anam
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A Death in Kitchawank, and Other Stories
- By: T. C. Boyle
- Narrated by: T. C. Boyle
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Few authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T. C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. Here are 14 new tales previously unpublished in book form. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle's stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The stories here reflect his maturing themes.
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Mixed Bag
- By AuntGert on 09-22-20
By: T. C. Boyle
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Haunted
- David Ash Series, Book 1
- By: James Herbert
- Narrated by: Steven Pacey
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A ghostly twist. Three nights of terror at the house called Edbrook. Three nights in which David Ash, there to investigate a haunting, will be victim of horrifying games. Three nights in which he will face the blood-chilling enigma of his own past. Three hideous nights before Edbrook's dreadful secret will be revealed...And the true nightmare will begin.to the surface, tormenting him, refusing to let him rest. The memory of what he once had been.
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Wait For It-----Wait For It
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 11-09-13
By: James Herbert
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Ironskin
- By: Tina Connolly
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Jane Eliot wears an iron mask. It's the only way to contain the fey curse that scars her cheek. The Great War is five years gone, but its scattered victims remain—the ironskin. When a carefully worded listing appears for a governess to assist with a “delicate situation”—a child born during the Great War—Jane is certain the child is fey-cursed, and that she can help.
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Light Fantasy With A Compelling Story
- By Jeff Jackson on 11-14-12
By: Tina Connolly
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Bride of the Rat God
- By: Barbara Hambly
- Narrated by: Marguerite Gavin
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1923, and silent film reigns in Hollywood. Of all the starlets, none is more beloved than Chrysanda Flamande, a diva as brilliant as she is difficult to manage. Handling her falls to Norah, widow of Chrysanda’s dead brother. She has always done her job well, but she was never equipped to deal with murder. When a violent killing shocks Chrysanda’s entourage, and other weird happenings swiftly follow, Norah begins to suspect that some strange power is stalking the star. In Chinatown she receives warning that a curse has been placed on the actress as vengeance for wearing a sacred amulet in one of her films.
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fun mix of fantasy and 1920s Hollywood
- By Kindle Customer on 11-11-14
By: Barbara Hambly
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family. even the gods seem to know about it.
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On a languid midsummer's day in the countryside, old Adam Godley, a renowned theoretical mathematician, is dying. His family gathers at his bedside: his son, young Adam, struggling to maintain his marriage to a radiantly beautiful actress; his 19-year-old daughter, Petra, filled with voices and visions as she waits for the inevitable; their mother, Ursula, whose relations with the Godley children are strained at best; and Petra's "young man" - very likely more interested in the father than the daughter - who has arrived for a superbly ill-timed visit.
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In a London Pub called The Coach and Horses, four men gather. Three of them have been friends for half a lifetime, having fought in the same war, drunk in the same pubs, and bet on the same horses. Now they have come together to deliver the ashes of a fifth man, Jack Dodds, to the sea. Their journey, which will take them deep into their collective and individual pasts, lies at the center of an astonishingly moving novel of friendship, memory, and fate.
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Don't hesitate
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Doctor Copernicus
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Sixteenth-century Europe is teeming with change and controversy: wars are being waged by princes and bishops and the repercussions of Luther are being felt through a convulsing Germany. In a remote corner of Poland, a modest canon is practicing medicine and studying the heavens, preparing a theory that will shatter the medieval view of the universe. In this astonishing work of historical imagination, John Banville offers a vivid portrait of a man of painful reticence.
By: John Banville
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Overall
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As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.
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‘loved it!
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Overall
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Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour, and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
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Disappointing
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Eclipse
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Overall
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Performance
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Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human. Memories, anxiety for the future, and more particularly, for his beloved but troubled daughter, conspire to distract him from his dreaming retirement.
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Well cast narrator and lush writing
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On Battersea Reach, a mixed bag of the temporarily lost and the patently eccentric live on houseboats, rising and falling with the tide of the Thames. There is good-natured Maurice, by occupation a male prostitute, by chance a receiver of stolen goods. And Richard, an ex-navy man whose boat, much like its owner, dominates the Reach.
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S.O.S
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Oscar Hopkins is a high-strung preacher's kid with hydrophobia and noisy knees. Lucinda Leplastrier is a frizzy-haired heiress who impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. In the early parts of this lushly written audiobook, author Peter Carey renders the seminal turning points in his protagonists' childhoods as exquisite 19th-century set pieces.
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A book to wade in, submerge into.
- By Darwin8u on 10-25-15
By: Peter Carey
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The Glorious Heresies
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Performance
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When grandmother Maureen Phelan is surprised in her home by a stranger, she clubs the intruder with a Holy Stone. The consequences of this unplanned murder connect four misfits struggling against their meager circumstances. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father, Tony, whose feud with his next-door neighbor threatens to ruin his family. Georgie is a sex worker who half-heartedly joins a born-again movement to escape her profession and drug habit.
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Best listen of the year! And it's December!
- By Lori K. on 12-13-16
By: Lisa McInerney
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The Famished Road
- By: Ben Okri
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- Unabridged
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Story
So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story.
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Too many supernatural elements for my taste
- By Merlin on 10-08-22
By: Ben Okri
What listeners say about The Sea
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rhonda Morrison
- 07-30-12
I was bored
What did you like best about The Sea? What did you like least?
The book has beautiful writing, but the story, for me, was just dull. The main character just didn't interest me.
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4 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Karen
- 07-20-07
OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
The book itself deserves the Booker prize it received and anything else possible in the way of awards. The contrast between the deeply sad story and the intensely gorgeous language evokes that paradox of despair expressed in beauty. I heard about the book in a round-about way and at first took it for a far older work, the author's willingness to lavish language, description, simile, so fooled me.
What makes THIS version so outstanding, however, is the reading by John Lee. His voice, phrasing, and emphasis are so perfect, his timing especially so apt, that I have trouble imagining the book without it.
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44 people found this helpful
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- Criticalthinker
- 11-02-18
Delicious writing!
This was some of the the most well-crafted prose I have encountered in years. The book is exquisite in all respects, and the narrator’s voice and presentation spot-on perfect. Highly recommended!
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1 person found this helpful
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- InBetween
- 12-07-19
Great story but mediocre performance
Banville's work is great, but unfortunately the way John Lee reads it takes away some of the beauty of the prose.
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- Neil Stedman
- 10-09-21
Verbose and different narrator needed
I do think John Lee is a great narrator. He is not the right choice for this book. An Irish narrator would have been a better choice.
As for the book, the verbose flux is not my style.
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- Darwin8u
- 07-24-15
The past beats inside me like a second heart.
Over the years, I've collected about 2 or 3 Banville books. The first was given to me by a girl I liked in HS, but never got around to reading it or dating her. I was finally inspired (or moved?) to read 'the Sea' (and a couple other Ireland-themed novels) because I was going to spend a week with the wife in Ireland and there is nothing better to read about on vacation than sex*, death, loss and sand. It was beautiful. It was poetry. It was nearly perfect.
It is easy to borrow images and allusions from other critics. It is easy to park Banville next to Beckett or Joyce (yes, fine, they all dropped from their mother's wombs onto the same emerald island). It is easy to play the literary cousin game and compare Banville to Proust or Nabokov or Henry James. These things are all true. They are also all fictions and obvious short cuts.
I haven't read enough of Banville to say he measures up to Proust or Nabokov, but damn this book was fine. There really must be something in the water because I'm reading Enright's The Gathering right now and my first thought was 'da feck'? Two Man Bookers by Irish novelists about drowning, death and memory. I'm sure there is more than water and whiskey to this island.
Anyway, I loved and adored 'The Sea'. I used those slick little page-markers everytime I came across a line of Banville's that seemed especially quoteable. I gave up when I ran out of markers. The edge of the book looked like a colorful Stegosaurus with markers dancing up and down the pages.
John Lee, as alwasys, was amazing in this narration. He truely is one of the noble and great narration gods.
* On a side note. It is VERY rare that a writer can actually write about sex without making me want to run from the room. They either make it too clinical (like a doctor popping zits) or too silly (like the cover of a romance novel) or too ethereal (like clouds copulating). Joyce could do it. Nabokov could do it. And I'm proud to say Banville can do it too.
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35 people found this helpful
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- Lydia
- 02-22-11
Dark, depressing, realistic but so poetic!
Having a love of Ireland lead me to listen to this book, one of my first audible downloads. While this book has to be described as dark and somewhat depressing, the upside is that the writing is the work of an absolute poet and perfectionist of the English language. Sublime! Regarding the narrator, he is superb. He sounds as if he truly loves the book and each and every character.
I felt tentative about this book at first; the language complex, the story dark. But I encourage readers to stick with it because the past and present are subtely inter-woven, the characters mysterious and interesting, and every question falls neatly into place at the end without the need for any purfunctory happy endings or elevation of character. The story is essentially about life and death and the emotions surrounding them, told by a "man"!
So...if you are interested in literature but written recently, give this awesome book a read. I was very impressed!
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- marebare60
- 02-03-18
Insight, wit and gorgeous prose
If you’re disappointed by books that seem to be recycling ideas, language, and stories you’ve heard somewhere else before, this book will provide much-needed relief.
The prose and creative use of the English language will remind you of Dickens, but the plot is very contemporary. The protagonist’s insights about life, death, and humanity in general, are profound. To top it off, It is read by someone with an Irish accent so thick It immediately whisks you away to the Irish seaside town in which the story takes place. The story is bittersweet verging on sad, but so is life.
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- Ann
- 11-07-21
Beautifully written Booker Prize Winner
This short and brilliant novel seemed particularly touching as I read It during a pandemic. It’s about death and life with numerous references to great art and literature. I personally enjoyed using both a paperback book and the audiobook together.. John Lee's narration was excellent as always.
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- Catherine
- 02-24-10
Listening to this leaves a bad taste in my mouth
Being a national best seller is nothing to sneeze at, and winning a Man Booker prize is a fairly substantial feat. With both these things in mind I purchased "The Sea". After the purchase, I still am of the opinion that the book has very noteworthy accomplishments, particularly so considering the fact that this book is really just so BAD. I could never find the motivation to care about what the main character experienced, expressed, or suffered; my only concern was that remaining in the company of this intolerable piece of work was causing more suffering on MY part. As far as the audio experience, let me estalish that anyone using this website knows the value of the audio media. "The Sea", then, stands as an excellent example it's failure. (Can I get an "OMG"?) I appreciate the attempt at colloquialisms and accents on the part of the narrator, but I heard enough "pitrs" and "figrs" to call a speech therapist. My advise is to pass this one by. Ignore the fancy packaging. You can't judge this book by its cover.
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9 people found this helpful