Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Dayswork  By  cover art

Dayswork

By: Chris Bachelder, Jennifer Habel
Narrated by: Janet Metzger
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $18.22

Buy for $18.22

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

A startlingly original, incantatory novel about marriage, mortality, and making art.

In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt. Her preoccupation both deepens and expands, and her days' work extends outward to an orbiting cast of Melvillean questers and fanatics, as well as to biographers and writers—among them Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell—whose lives resonate with Melville's. As she pulls these distant figures close, her quarantine quest ultimately becomes a midlife reckoning with her own marriage and ambition.

Absorbing, charming, and intimate, Dayswork considers the blurry lines between life and literature, the slippage between what happens and what gets recorded, and the ways we locate ourselves in the lives of others. In wry, epigrammatic prose, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have crafted an exquisite and daring novel.

©2023 Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

What listeners say about Dayswork

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    2
Performance
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    2
Story
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    4
  • 4 Stars
    1
  • 3 Stars
    1
  • 2 Stars
    0
  • 1 Stars
    2

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A Marvel

I listened to it twice because I was sure there were wonderful things I missed the first time through, and sure enough. This lovely, moving, and, at times, laugh-out-loud humourous meditation on marriage, time, truth, and loss is stunningly beautiful, even incantatory. Not for everyone, I imagine, but for those who (a) can appreciate the unusual and who (b) do possess a love of literature, this one may be for you. Can't say enough good things.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Quite different

I love the book Moby Dick and enjoyed learning a lot about Melville, in this strange but somewhat satisfying book. I would have liked it to delve further into the narrator's marriage, to deepen it and tie parallels, perhaps, with the authors and their work. I think it misses the opportunity to be good literature and remains a strange notebook-spilling of interesting and fascinating material with a few reminders it was researched during our time, a pandemic.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Into the whale’s belly

This is a fabulous, lively, and inventive book. The reading makes the story more personal and like long meetings over coffee. The passion is evident but gentle not the exultation of pure fandom. Jennifer Havel interweaves her marriage and her passion for Melville almost like Latin American magic realism with two men each alive to the narrator but without competition or jealousy. I had thought I knew Melville — now I really know him.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!