The Sympathizer
A Novel
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The Sympathizer
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Narrated by:
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Francois Chau
About this listen
Now an HBO® Original Limited Series on Max, and winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, a startling debut novel featuring one of the most remarkable narrators of recent years: a conflicted subversive and idealist working as a double agent in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, as well as seven other awards, and now an HBO® Original Limited Series on Max, The Sympathizer has sold over one million copies worldwide and is one of the most acclaimed books of the 21st century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 175
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 155
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 155
Bao Ninh, a former North Vietnamese soldier, provides a strikingly honest look at how the Vietnam War forever changed his life, his country, and the people who live there. Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its nonheroic, nonideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international best seller.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My dead former enemy was speaking to me!
- By Joe R. on 05-13-18
By: Bao Ninh
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Mason & Dixon
- By: Thomas Pynchon
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 33 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 165
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 137
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 136
Charles Mason (1728-1786) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-1779) were the British surveyors best remembered for running the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland that we know today as the Mason-Dixon Line. Here is their story as re-imagined by Thomas Pynchon, featuring Native Americans and frontier folk, ripped bodices, naval warfare, conspiracies erotic and political, and major caffeine abuse. We follow the mismatched pair - one rollicking, the other depressive; one Gothic, the other pre-Romantic.
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5 out of 5 stars
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What the hell just happened?
- By Kid A on 12-23-19
By: Thomas Pynchon
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The Sellout
- A Novel
- By: Paul Beatty
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 3,966
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,578
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Story4 out of 5 stars 3,567
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality: the black Chinese restaurant.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Appreciated it, but didn't like it
- By Eugenia on 04-14-16
By: Paul Beatty
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The Refugees
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 900
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 787
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Story4 out of 5 stars 790
With the coruscating gaze that informed The Sympathizer, in The Refugees Viet Thanh Nguyen gives voice to lives led between two worlds, the adopted homeland and the country of birth. From a young Vietnamese refugee who suffers profound culture shock when he comes to live with two gay men in San Francisco, to a woman whose husband is suffering from dementia and starts to confuse her for a former lover, to a girl living in Ho Chi Minh City whose older half sister comes back from America having seemingly accomplished everything she never will.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good collection of short stories
- By Thomas More on 03-19-17
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 843
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Story4 out of 5 stars 850
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.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Quiet American
- By: Graham Greene
- Narrated by: Joseph Porter
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,129
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 949
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 944
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.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Terrible narrator nearly derails Greene novel.
- By Richard on 07-12-12
By: Graham Greene
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Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 810
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 500
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Story4 out of 5 stars 506
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
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5 out of 5 stars
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tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
- By: Junot Diaz
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Staci Snell
- Length: 16 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 4,919
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,288
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Story4 out of 5 stars 3,305
Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wondrous Book!!!
- By Robert on 06-22-12
By: Junot Diaz
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The Mountains Sing
- By: Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
- Narrated by: Quyen Ngo
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2,104
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,845
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,833
With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Incredible first English language novel
- By Gregory Barbee on 03-23-20
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,610
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 4,989
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5,009
It's 1939, in New York City. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat: smuggling himself out of Hitler's Prague. He's looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a partner in creating the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Inspired by their own fantasies, fears, and dreams, they create the Escapist.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A World I DON'T Ever Want to Escape From.
- By Darwin8u on 06-12-12
By: Michael Chabon
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Milkman
- By: Anna Burns
- Narrated by: Bríd Brennan
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,989
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,774
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,770
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes "interesting" - the last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed, and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is a story of inaction with enormous consequences.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Like the writing, not the audio issues
- By Criticalthinker on 12-31-18
By: Anna Burns
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Underground Railroad
- By: Colson Whitehead
- Narrated by: Aïssa Maïga
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall1.5 out of 5 stars 18
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Performance1 out of 5 stars 15
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Story1 out of 5 stars 14
Cora, seize ans, est esclave sur une plantation de coton dans la Géorgie d'avant la guerre de Sécession. Abandonnée par sa mère lorsqu'elle était enfant, elle survit tant bien que mal à la violence de sa condition. Lorsque Caesar, un esclave récemment arrivé de Virginie, lui propose de s'enfuir, elle accepte et tente, au péril de sa vie, de gagner avec lui les États libres du Nord. De la Caroline du Sud à l'Indiana en passant par le Tennessee, Cora va vivre une incroyable odyssée.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Wrong language.
- By Anonymous User on 11-24-22
By: Colson Whitehead
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The Overstory
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9,981
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 8,733
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 8,718
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late 20th-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits 100 years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.
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4 out of 5 stars
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eye opening
- By Michael Stansberry on 05-23-18
By: Richard Powers
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The Corrections
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 21 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,998
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,596
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Story4 out of 5 stars 2,604
The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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3 out of 5 stars
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
- By Georgia Burns on 10-08-13
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Underworld
- By: Don DeLillo
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 31 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 710
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 624
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Story4 out of 5 stars 628
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
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4 out of 5 stars
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CYBEX burned into my eyes
- By Ruth Ann Orlansky on 07-01-12
By: Don DeLillo