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The Known World
- Narrated by: Kevin Free
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2004
National Book Critics Circle Award, Fiction, 2004
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief; and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery; and rumor of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.
An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges seamlessly between the past and future and back again to the present, The Known World weaves together the lives of freed and enslaved blacks, whites, and Indians, and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multidimensional world created by the institution of slavery.
Critic reviews
IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2005
"A masterpiece that deserves a place in the American literary canon." (Time)
"This remarkable novel, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and short-listed for the National Book Award, deserves all the acclaim it has won and then some, especially in this flawless rendition.... Kevin Free's narration is so accomplished that when a woman character speaks, you utterly forget that she does it through a man's voice. He gives each character color, personality, and heft, without ever vamping or straining for effect. The novel bears comparison with Trollope and Faulkner, and Kevin Free's performance of it is in the same league." (AudioFile)
"A complex, often startling picture of life in the region....[Jones'] narrative achieves crushing momentum through sheer accumulation of detail, unusual historical insight, and generous character writing." (Publishers Weekly)
"Jones has written a book of tremendous moral intricacy." (The New Yorker)
Featured Article: Who's the best? Rediscover the greatest, most notable American writers of all time
To curate a list of famous American writers who are also considered among the best American authors, a few things count: current ratings for their works, their particular time periods in history, critical reception, their prevalence in the 21st century, and yes, the awards they won. Many of these authors are taught in school today. From Hemingway to Harper Lee, these famous American authors are all worthy of enduring recognition—and a fresh listen!
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Great Story, Decent Narrator
- By Keon Gardner on 12-04-17
By: Howard Fast
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Cold Sassy Tree
- By: Olive Ann Burns
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The one thing you can depend on in Cold Sassy, Georgia, is that word gets around fast. If the preacher's wife's petticoat shows, the ladies will make the talk last a week. But on July 5, 1906, things take a scandalous turn. That is the day E. Rucker Blakeslee, proprietor of the general store and barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson, a woman half his age and, worse yet, a Yankee!
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A Feel-Good Story
- By Chrissie on 07-13-13
By: Olive Ann Burns
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The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 1: The Witness
- By: Sharon E. Foster
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Leading a small army of slaves, Nat Turner was a man born with a mission: to set the captives free. When words failed, he ignited an uprising that left over 50 whites dead. In the predawn hours of August 22, 1831, Nat Turner stormed into history with a Bible in one hand, brandishing a sword in the other. His rebellion shined a spotlight on slavery and the state of Virginia and divided a nation's trust. Turner himself became a lightning rod for abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and a terror and secret shame for slave owners.
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Purchase and Download NOW!
- By Giselle E Ambursley on 03-03-16
By: Sharon E. Foster
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May the Road Rise Up to Meet You
- A Novel
- By: Peter Troy
- Narrated by: John Keating, Allyson Johnson, Marrie Kreinik, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Ethan McOwen is an Irish immigrant whose endurance is tested in Brooklyn and the Five Points at the height of its urban destitution; he is among the first to join the famed Irish Brigade and becomes a celebrated war photographer. Marcella, a society girl from Spain, defies her father to become a passionate abolitionist. Mary and Micah are slaves of varying circumstances, who form an instant connection and embark on a tumultuous path to freedom. All four lives unfold in two beautiful love stories, which eventually collide.
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Four passionate performances give wings to story
- By Cheimon on 04-26-12
By: Peter Troy
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Ruth's Journey
- The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind
- By: Donald McCaig
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe
- Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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On the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue, an island consumed by the flames of revolution, a senseless attack leaves only one survivor - an infant girl. She falls into the hands of two French émigrés, Henri and Solange Fournier, who take the beautiful child they call Ruth to the bustling American city of Savannah. What follows is the sweeping tale of Ruth's life as shaped by her strong-willed mistress and other larger-than-life personalities she encounters in the South.
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Disappointing
- By June McCall on 01-26-17
By: Donald McCaig
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Blackwater: The Complete Saga
- By: Michael McDowell
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 30 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Blackwater is the saga of a small town, Perdido, Alabama, and Elinor Dammert, the stranger who arrives there under mysterious circumstances on Easter Sunday, 1919. On the surface, Elinor is gracious, charming, anxious to belong in Perdido, and eager to marry Oscar Caskey, the eldest son of Perdido's first family. But her beautiful exterior hides a shocking secret. Beneath the waters of the Perdido River, she turns into something terrifying, a creature whispered about in stories that have chilled the residents of Perdido for generations.
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A 6 Star Worthy Epic!
- By jksullycats on 10-29-17
By: Michael McDowell
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The Sound and the Fury
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
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Hang in
- By W.Denis on 07-11-05
By: William Faulkner
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Trials of the Earth
- The True Story of a Pioneer Woman
- By: Mary Mann Hamilton
- Narrated by: Barbara Benjamin Creel
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866-c.1936) was encouraged to record her experiences as a female pioneer. The result is the only known firsthand account of a remarkable woman thrust into the center of taming the American South - surviving floods, tornadoes, and fires; facing bears, panthers, and snakes; managing a boardinghouse in Arkansas that was home to an eccentric group of settlers; and running a logging camp in Mississippi that blazed a trail for development in the Mississippi Delta.
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Long and slow.
- By Ren on 10-31-17
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To Kill a Mockingbird
- By: Harper Lee
- Narrated by: Sissy Spacek
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Harper Lee’s Pulitzer prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep south - and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred, available now for the first time as a digital audiobook. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the country.
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A gift to be treasured
- By David Shear on 07-09-14
By: Harper Lee
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Clearing in the Wild
- By: Jane Kirkpatrick
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Young Emma Wagner chafes at the constraints of Bethel colony, an 1850s religious community in Missouri that is determined to remain untainted by the concerns of the world. A passionate and independent thinker, she resents the limitations placed on women, who are expected to serve in quiet submission.
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a clearing in the wild
- By katie on 07-21-09
By: Jane Kirkpatrick
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Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All
- By: Allan Gurganus
- Narrated by: Barbara McCulloh
- Length: 49 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and fans alike fell in love with the voice of 99-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the 20th century, when she was 15 and her husband was 50. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern Independence", Lucy became a "veteran of the veteran" with a unique perspective on Southern history and Southern manhood.
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Dated.
- By edie butler on 04-06-21
By: Allan Gurganus
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Cataloochee
- By: Wayne Caldwell
- Narrated by: Scott Sowers
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Wayne Caldwell's Cataloochee -a rich, vivid, arresting work beginning at the dawn of Reconstruction - sprawls across the succeeding generations like the vast green mountains of its rural North Carolina setting. Best-selling author Charles Frazier calls it "a brilliant portrait of a community and a way of life long gone, a lost America." This enthralling saga evokes the full color spectrum of mountain life, from lights to darks and every shade in between.
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Love It!
- By Cynthia J. Hakansson on 02-27-09
By: Wayne Caldwell
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Wondrous Book!!!
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It's 1949 and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to the grand stage of New York City. It is the era of mambo, and the Castillo brothers, workers by day, become stars of the dance halls by night, where their orchestra plays the lush, sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings. This is their moment of youth, exuberance, love, and freedom―a golden time that decades later is remembered with nostalgia and deep affection.
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An allegorical story of World War I set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment.
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Bad Production and Direction
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The Ghost Writer
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The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress.
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Turning Sentences Around
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The Shipping News
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At 36, Quoyle, a third-rate newspaperman, is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife gets her just desserts. He retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As three generations of his family cobble up new lives, Quoyle confronts his private demons - and the unpredictable forces of nature and society - and begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
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Can't Explain Why I Love This Book
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World’s End
- The Lanny Budd Novels, Book 1
- By: Upton Sinclair
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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.
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didn't finish
- By Bird Miller on 05-08-22
By: Upton Sinclair
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Empire Falls (Danish Edition)
- By: Richard Russo
- Narrated by: Peter Bøttger
- Length: 21 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Miles Roby har langet burgere over disken i Empire Grill i tyve år, og derfra kan han se ned ad hovedgaden i den engang så driftige industriby Empire Falls og fornemme byens puls, som nu slår meget langsomt. For Whiting-familien, der ejer fabrikkerne og det meste andet på egnen, har flyttet produktionen væk fra byen, og det har skruet livet i Empire Falls ned på vågeblus.Så det er bekymrede kunder, der letter deres hjerte over for Miles - som har sine helt egne problemer.
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It's all Greek to me!
- By Gashea on 11-06-16
By: Richard Russo
What listeners say about The Known World
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Daniel
- 09-03-04
A meandering audiobook...
This is one of the books that seems to have a never ending narrative. After about 4 hours I had no real sense of what was occuring other that the comings and goings of many, many people. My wife calls me the "goal oriented" man, and she is correct, as usual. I look for a theme or direction in a book.
Well written and gently narrated, it just never seems to go anywhere. The patient, poetic souls out there will likely enjoy this audiobook, but for me, I shall never know how it ends...
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63 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Rachel
- 09-06-04
wonderful and highly recommended
i am fairly new to audiobooks but very glad that i listened to this at the begining of my journey - it was a wonderful early introduction. The story is not a straightforward journey from A to B, rather a journey around a whole community, every individual and every incident in it. There is an enourmous amout of detail which does mean that you need to pay close attention to it, but the depth of character which it creates is well worth the effort. When I finished listening I was still wondering about these characters. The book is inspired by the concept of free black people who owned slaves in Virginia, an aspect of American history I had not known anything about. I loved this 'read' and hope that you do too.
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56 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kindle Customer
- 03-27-05
A soft-spoken treasure
This book is a real pleasure to listen to. It's not a plot-driven book, so be forewarned, if that's what you're in the market for. Instead, it's an empathetic, nuanced, and often poetic look at a certain historical time and place. Jones is just an extraordinarily humane writer; every character is painted in painstaking detail and with unusual sympathy. This is one of my favorites of the audiobooks I've listened to.
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27 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Anjan
- 09-14-04
A Fascinating World
Very few people, black or white, would be familiar with this world since it is set in a world of slavery prior to the American Civil war and deals with *black* slave owners. That in itself is a fascinating backdrop that Edward P. Jones masterful utilizes along with the black dialect of the time. The author creates a richly textured story around multiple, intertwined lives within the *known world* that exists largely within the microcosm of the plantation and at most Manchester county. Without making too many proclamations about good and evil (which would have made it a bland read) Edward P. Jones creates characters that are not cleanly delineated or labeled much like real-life where people have their many shaded complexities. The only criticism I have is that it is difficult to follow the numerous characters as they are first introduced. The story does weave in and out of plots so you need to get used to this approach early on. Once you do, it's a great ride that keeps moving forward.
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21 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Barbara
- 11-25-04
Will be a classic of African American literature
Reminded me of Toni Morrison's "Paradise." Much more readable than Faulkner. The first time you read it for the plot. Then read it again for the way everything links together. There are so many different and opposing types of characters whose inner lives are convincingly conveyed. Jones opens new territory by describing slavery as a commonly accepted economic system, with free blacks being even more likely than free whites to own slaves. Wealth and caste are as divisive as race, and a social hierarchy based on wealth as much as skin color means that below God are wealthy whites, then wealthy blacks, then middle class whites, then middle class blacks (a problem category), then poor whites followed by Indians followed by poor blacks, followed by slaves. My only problem is that Jones claims to have done little research, and made up his county to avoid being held to historical sources. But nevertheless, Jones raises so many important themes in this novel that are supported by historical sources. Anyone who likes African American literature or who is interested in the history of slavery or the American South should read this novel. Slavery is a divisive issue in several black families here (no white families). For some, like Caldonia?s mother, is the only source of wealth, a wealth worth murdering for. For others, like Henry, it is simply a means to an end, and for some, like his parents, the entire system is morally objectionable.
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Overall
- Patrice
- 12-26-05
A must read
The Known World was a terrifyingly good read. It shows how easily humans can become inhuman for all the seemingly right reasons. How close to the surface our intolerance and bigotry still is however much we claim to be civilized, moral and socially conscious. The great lesson of this book is that despite our horror of and moral outrage at the treatment of slaves in the South in those dark times, we still manage to cast a blind eye to the continuation of this behavior in different places, against different peoples and cultures. We have no right to claim our moral superiority as long as people are enslaved anywhere by anyone AND we fail to act against it. Jones has not just written another slave narrative. He has held a mirror to the face of modern humanity and shown its fatal flaws.
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Overall
- Edward
- 09-13-04
Tedious!
The premise of this book is very intriguing: freed slaves owning slaves. However, the novelty of this premise wears off somewhere around hour #4, and you still have about 10 hours of listening to go! All-in-all, it is a well-written book, but one that could have gotten it's point across in less time.
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Overall
- Terry
- 11-24-04
Hard to Get the Picture
To me, this was a tough listen. There are lots characters in this work, but they're not described in any real detail, and so they're hard to visualize. This makes them difficult to track because of the writer's narrative style--rambling from one topic to another, in and out of past and present time. Another thing that's tough on the listener is that the writer uses straight narration and doesn't use much descriptive metaphor. Noting in the writer's style causes the mind to light up. I think the narrator tries to save the book, but in the end he really can't. An eccentic choice for the Pulitzer, which is usually pretty good stuff.
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Overall
- Robert
- 09-25-04
2004 Pulitzer Prize/Ntl Bk Critics Circle Award
Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. An excellent book. It is much more than a story of free blacks owning slaves. It is a complex story set in times of American slavery and involves good people, bad people, good people who become bad people, and wonderful things and terrible things happening. The word "Property" is used to describe and call the slaves. An excellent story line, woven in elaborate time warps and beautiful language. Well narrated.
This book is great literature and carries itself along with well-developed characters with whom you will identify -- painfully so at times. This book is attractive for its quality writing, memorable characters and intriguing story line, not for page-turning suspense.
This African-American author's first novel.
Book prizes are no guarantee of a good book, but this book clearly well deserved its awards.
The last ten minutes of the audio is a fascinating interview with the author.
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Overall
- Eva Gannon
- 07-31-06
Disjointed and Disappointing
The premise of the book grabbed me, and I was eager to read it. The Pulitzer it won further whetted my appetite. Although I slogged all the way through it, the book was disjointed in its narrative, the characters were superficial, and there was no conflict, resolution and conclusion. The book jumps erratically from character to character, situation to situation, and even to time and place. The book is so poorly written that the Pulitzer is puzzling. I agree with the reviewer who said the book desperately needed an editor.
The author's comments in his interview cast some light on it. He states that he did little research and gave each character equal treatment. He also stated this is his first novel; he's written short stories. That was my impression of the book; it reads like a series of short stories with a weak attempt at connection by a central theme.
The book's subject is unique, one which hasn't been covered much either historically or in literature. Had the author developed his characters and his central theme, he could added a unique layer of perspective to the shameful history of slavery in America.
Sadly, I wouldn't recommend this book, and I doubt that I'll read anything else by this author.
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15 people found this helpful