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A Handful of Dust
- Narrated by: Andrew Sachs
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
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Charlotte Dean enjoys nothing more than the solitude of her London flat and the monotonous days of her work at a travel bookshop. But when her younger sister unceremoniously bursts into her quiet life one afternoon, Charlotte's world turns topsy-turvy. Beloved author D. E. Stevenson captures the intricacies of post-World War I England with a light, comic touch that perfectly embodies the spirit of the time. Alternatively heartbreaking and witty, The Young Clementina is a touching tale of love, loss and redemption through friendship.
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Miss Dean's Dilemma
- By Jerri C on 05-02-18
By: D. E. Stevenson
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The Professor's House
- By: Willa Cather
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 6 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor Godfrey St. Peter is a man in his fifties who has devoted his life to his work, his wife, his garden, and his daughters, and achieved success with all of them. But when St. Peter is called on to move to a new, more comfortable house, something in him rebels. And although at first that rebellion consists of nothing more than mild resistance to his family's wishes, it imperceptibly comes to encompass the entire order of his life.
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Gently compelling
- By TiffanyD on 08-12-19
By: Willa Cather
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The Far Country
- By: Nevil Shute
- Narrated by: Julie Maisey
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A young English woman leaves her ageing parents to visit friends living in the Australian outback, where she quickly falls in love - both with the country and with Carl, a doctor and Czech refugee. Brought together through dramatic encounters and strange twists of fate, their relationship hangs in the balance when Jennifer is called back to England.
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Great Story!
- By BikeMeister on 02-11-13
By: Nevil Shute
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I Capture the Castle
- By: Dodie Smith
- Narrated by: Jenny Agutter
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this coming of age story, Dodie Smith introduces the visionary and eccentric character of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain. The youngest daughter in a family of impoverished artists, it is her imagination and writing that takes us away from the ramshackle old English castle where they live, and towards an intriguing tale of husband-hunting and light-hearted sibling rivalry.
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Well, that was a surprise
- By Matthew on 12-16-13
By: Dodie Smith
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The Town House
- By: Norah Lofts
- Narrated by: Juliet Prague, Martyn Read
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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"It was in the first week of October in the year 1391 that I first came face to face with the man who owned me… the man whose lightest word was to us, his villeins, weightier than the King’s law or the edicts of our Holy Father…” So began the story of Martin Reed - a serf whose resentment of the automatic rule of his feudal lord finally flared into open defiance.
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My favorite author
- By Karie on 07-09-15
By: Norah Lofts
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Picnic at Hanging Rock
- By: Joan Lindsay
- Narrated by: Jacqueline McKenzie
- Length: 3 hrs and 1 min
- Abridged
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St Valentine’s Day, in the midst of the hot summer of 1900, a party of schoolgirls went on a picnic to Hanging Rock. Some were never to return…. An Australian classic, the disappearance of three girls and a schoolteacher at Hanging Rock has captivated and intrigued audiences for generations. Jacqueline McKenzie’s interpretation of the best-selling novel captures all of the beauty of the Rock and illustrates the eerie sense of the unknown for which the story is legendary.
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NOT UNabridged!
- By Doreen on 05-09-15
By: Joan Lindsay
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Lonely Road
- By: Nevil Shute
- Narrated by: Laurence Kennedy
- Length: 8 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Commander Malcolm Stevenson, a rich middle-aged man, finds his lonely life turned upside down when he falls in love with a pretty dance hostess. His involvement with Mollie "Sixpence" Gordon will lead to the exposure of a conspiracy to sabotage the British General Election, but Stevenson’s dogged pursuit of the criminals will throw his life and the lives of those he cares about into grave danger.
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Great story telling, implausible plot
- By Robert Bliss on 10-27-16
By: Nevil Shute
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Now, Voyager
- Femmes Fatales
- By: Olive Higgins Prouty
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Lonely, dowdy, repressed, and pushing 40, Charlotte finds salvation at a sanitarium, where she undergoes an emotional and physical transformation. After her extreme makeover, the new Charlotte tests her mettle by embarking on a cruise and finds herself in a torrid love affair with a married man which ends at the conclusion of the voyage. But only then can the real journey begin, as Charlotte is forced to navigate a new life for herself.
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The Inspiration for The Movie Classic
- By Susie on 12-17-12
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The Forsyte Chronicles, Vol. 2
- A Modern Comedy
- By: John Galsworthy
- Narrated by: David Timson
- Length: 34 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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John Galsworthy's magnificent trilogy of power and passion chronicles the wealthy Forsyte family. The complete Chronicles are divided into three volumes, containing nine books and four interludes in total. Volume 2, A Modern Comedy, focuses on Soames's vivacious daughter, Fleur. Soames tries constantly to protect her but is baffled by the carefree attitudes in post-war London. Fleur and her husband Michael Mont host society gatherings, but her previous affair with Jon Forsyte leaves embers of a passion that are ready to ignite - with dreadful consequences.
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Very worthwhile
- By Jonathan Kalkstein on 09-27-22
By: John Galsworthy
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Well Written & Funny but Lacking
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At least one chapter missing
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Satire? Or just mean spirited?
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Well Written & Funny but Lacking
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And There Alone is Hope
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At least one chapter missing
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Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday - and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art.
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Satire? Or just mean spirited?
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A book of brilliant entertainments: 39 stories spanning the entire career of a great modern writer and an undisputed comic genius, "a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers' row (Swift, Poe, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters" ( Time).
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MORE than actual print book!
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Brideshead Revisited: Booktrack Edition
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The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece - an audiobook that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities.
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Annoying music damages a great novel
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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.
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Wickedly Funny
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Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
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Gilbert Pinfold is a reclusive Catholic novelist suffering from acute inertia. In an attempt to keep insomnia at bay he has been imbibing an unappetizing cocktail of bromide, chloral, and creme de menthe. He books a passage on the SS Caliban, and as it cruises towards Ceylon, he slips into madness. Almost as soon as the gangplank lifts, Pinfold hears sounds coming out of the ceiling of his cabin: wild jazz bands, barking dogs, and loud revival meetings. He is convinced that an erratic public-address system is letting him hear everything that goes on aboard ship....until instead of just sounds, he hears voices.
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A wonderful depiction of the nastiness of hallucinations
- By Korbin Gardner on 06-25-22
By: Evelyn Waugh
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Men at Arms
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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.
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Supposedly Humorous
- By Kindle Customer on 11-13-18
By: Evelyn Waugh
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Scobie, a police officer in a West African colony, is a good and honest man. But when he falls in love, he is forced into a betrayal of everything that he has ever believed in, and his struggle to maintain the happiness of two women destroys him.
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Starts Very Slowly then Boom!
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The Evelyn Waugh BBC Radio Drama Collection
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Evelyn Waugh is one of the pre-eminent English novelists of the 20th century. This collection comprises six of his finest works, dramatised by award-winning writer Jeremy Front, including Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited, Scoop and Sword of Honour (The Waugh Trilogy).
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One of the best dramatizations I have listened to!
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By: Evelyn Waugh, and others
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Nostromo
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One of the greatest political novels in any language, Nostromo reenacts the establishment of modern capitalism in a remote South American province locked between the Andes and the Pacific. In Sulaco, a harbor town in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, a vivid cast of characters is caught up in a civil war to decide whether its fabulously wealthy silver can be preserved from the hands of venal politicians.
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Page-turning masterpiece garbled by narrator
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By: Joseph Conrad
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Black Mischief
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Black Mischief, Waugh's third novel, helped to establish his reputation as a master satirist. Set on the fictional African island of Azania, the novel chronicles the efforts of Emperor Seth, assisted by the Englishman Basil Seal, to modernize his kingdom. Profound hilarity ensues from the issuance of homemade currency, the staging of a "Birth Control Gala", the rightful ruler's demise at his own rather long and tiring coronation ceremonies, and a good deal more mischief.
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Raucous, Not Racist
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By: Evelyn Waugh
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Appointment in Samarra
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In December 1930, just before Christmas, the Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, social circuit is electrified with parties and dances. At the center of the social elite stand Julian and Caroline English. But in one rash moment born inside a highball glass, Julian breaks with polite society and begins a rapid descent toward self-destruction.
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Quite good, but not a classic
- By Michael on 04-25-15
By: John O'Hara, and others
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A Death in the Family
- By: James Agee
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Decades after its original publication, James Agee’s last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man’s death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed.
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It just has to be lived through...
- By Darwin8u on 01-15-20
By: James Agee
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A Bend in the River
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Beautiful, insightful, troubling
- By Lawrence on 01-15-05
By: V. S. Naipaul
What listeners say about A Handful of Dust
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Michael
- 05-16-15
Slow Start then Subtle
This book takes quite a bit of time to get going, but finally becomes worth the slog. The first 1/3 of the book is very English aristocrat society with a bunch of setup and with classically stilted and mostly uninteresting characters. Then the cucumber sandwiches hit the fan and the story suddenly becomes an unexpectedly human story.
Many (if not most) readers may not appreciate this book. It starts unbelievably slowly, then becomes a subtly dark, subtly satirical, subtly futile, subtly sad story. Notice there is a lot of subtly in there.
This is not an overtly funny book, but I laughed out loud a number of times, but these were dark, almost guilt inducing, laughs (the “why did I laugh at that, that’s not funny” kind of laugh). The humor is highly contextual, elusive, and mixed with futility and disillusionment.
I ended up liking this book quite a bit, but it is not something I would read again soon. The narration is really completely OK but not outstanding in any way and some of the voices are too characterized for my taste.
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15 people found this helpful
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- Fog
- 03-17-15
Worth getting thru the first chapter...
This book was such a surprise. I had read Waugh as a teenager but missed this one. It's very funny, at times shockingly anachronistic but wry and tragi-comic. Where it ends is a million miles from where it starts. Begin the journey!
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7 people found this helpful
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- David C.
- 10-15-19
Freedom can sometimes be a prison of its own
Had I not encountered this book on the Modern Library Top 100 list of the best 20th Century novels, I would never have heard of this work. And how terrible that would have been .
Set in the 30's initially in rural England and London then transitioning to the rainforest of South America, the story focuses on Tony and Brenda Last, a thirty-something couple who enjoy the trapping of the rural ancestral Last estate. As was so common, while the properties and titles suggest a great wealth, in truth, these are rural working lands that barely provide enough income to maintain the estate. Tony is in love with the country squire life and the atmosphere it provides for their young son. To Brenda, it is tedious and boring, she finding relief in the London shopping trips and parties and the privileged life it suggests despite having to travel third class by train to stay in budget.
Infidelity runs rampant among the London elite to which Brenda is not immune but to which Tony appears oblivious. When tragedy befalls the family that should draw the couple together, Brenda instead uses the pretext to stay in London. In contrast, Tony is compelled to travel abroad, a dramatic shift from his homebody nature which presents a precarious challenge for the future of the Last's.
Writer Evelyn Waugh is best known to Americans for his work Brideshead Revisited. This work presents ribald subject matter without vulgarity. The humor is dark and the outcome demonstrative of how we are often prisoners of our own making if we only make the effort to liberate ourselves from the prisons of our own device.
A marvelous, must read novel.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Client d'Amazon
- 06-25-18
Wonderful and sad at the same time
A brilliantly written decomposition of a marriage. It irrevocably makes you sympathise with the unfortunate husband and the question arises whether boredom with a dull spouse is a good enough reason to set in motion the mechanics that without exception produce calamity and affliction. In my view, Brenda Last is an Anna Karenina unpunished. While poor Tony accumulates most of the bad luck from the broken marriage which he had not enough spirit to prevent from falling apart, she manages to keep the water from ever really entering her boat.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Edward Bohnert
- 10-22-16
A beautiful novel.
Evelyn Waugh is a wonderful English writer. Please read his works and enjoy! You won't be disappointed.
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- Daniel
- 06-01-13
Saterical treatment of human decadence
Tony and Brenda Last, well endowed with legacy, are the best of cultivated English aristocracy. That is until Brenda's inexplicable affair with the annoying and feckless John Beaver, fostered by the same suave aristocratic society, immolates the marriage. Tony, abashed by the hypocritical divorce proceeding, decided to take a life changing Amazon exploration where he received more than he bargained for. Handful of Dust is layered with comical cynicism, while its core lay bare the face of human decadence.
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- Celeste
- 04-16-21
Humorous
I really enjoyed this novel. I liked the emotion the reader gave to characters. It gave life to the story and allowed for further insight of what the various characters represent.
I usually don't enjoy novels outside of science fiction, however Evelyn Waugh provides an intriguing representation of British culture (during the early 1900's) and an unstable marriage. It almost feels as if you're reading a 1920's romcom film. It is highly entertaining and thoughtful. It really gives one a change of perspective to how laws sometimes can be unjust.
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- Kelly
- 07-29-20
an exploration of class
One of the themes I least enjoy is the exploration of class as it relates to those with money. And ironically, I love books that explore class with respect to the poor.
A Handful of Dust is my first read of a book by Waugh, and I didn't really connect to it. This one introduces us to an English aristrocrat named Tony Last who is clinging to the life he always had. He is married to Brenda, and is considered very lucky to have married her. She however, hates the home he loves and finds country life boring and unfulfilling. She takes a flat in London where she has met (and starts an affair with) John Beaver, a social climber who painted a picture of the social life they could have together in the city. To have John, she leaves her husband and young son, and tries to entice her husband into having his own affair. The marriage ends, and the book dives deeply into the consequences of divorce in that era.
Nobody escapes this one without pain; the death of the marriage hurts everyone involved.
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- Chelz
- 02-20-19
Bitingly Engaging!
This is the 2nd book I’ve read by E. Waugh. The first book was Brideshead Revisited which I enjoyed from start to finish . A Handful of Dust is rich in not very likable characters who are beyond redemption. The story is abundantly sarcastic and cleverly funny in a dark way.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-27-16
unexpected ending
great writing. subtle humor wonderful descriptions. ending left me shocked. totally unexpected. great food for thought
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