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The Master Butcher's Singing Club
- Narrated by: Louise Erdrich
- Length: 16 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as Argus, North Dakota, where he settles, building a business and a home for his family, which now includes Eva and four sons, and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town.
What happens when the Old World meets the New, in the person of Delphine Watzka, becomes one of the great adventures of Fidelis's life. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted. She meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. These momentous encounters will determine the course of Delphine's life, and the trajectory of this brilliant new novel in which Louise Erdrich creates a world filled with memorable characters who grapple with the worst and best of human nature.
Critic reviews
"An enrapturing plunge into the depths of the human heart." (Washington Post Book World)
"Bordering on magical realism, this marvelous yarn introduces a world of rich, expansive imagery and an abundance of memorably compelling characters." (Publishers Weekly)
"Erdrich narrates with expressive intimacy, bringing authenticity to the exceptional people who populate Argus, North Dakota.... A master storyteller, Erdrich creates charismatic characters, and her reading makes each distinctly memorable." (AudioFile)
"Powerful, richly detailed....It's clear that Erdrich, one of our finest writers, is working at the very peak of her considerable powers." (Booklist)
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Truly Plaice, an overly large and ungainly girl, is the polar opposite of her sister, Serena Jane, the epitome of feminine perfection. With their parents dead, Truly and Serena Jane are separated: Serena Jane to live a life of privilege as the future May Queen and Truly to live on the outskirts of town, the subject of constant abuse and humiliation.
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meh...
- By Victoria on 02-25-09
By: Tiffany Baker
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
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Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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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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Story
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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The Ballad of the Sad Café
- By: Carson McCullers
- Narrated by: David Ledoux, Joe Barrett, Therese Plummer, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers' best stories, including her beloved novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose cafe serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind", McCullers' first published story, written when she was only 17, about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.
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Literate short stories
- By RueRue on 02-23-16
By: Carson McCullers
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The Rock Orchard
- By: Paula Wall
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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"Some women can touch a man and heal like Jesus. The man who sees sunrise from a Belle woman's bed will swear he's been born again." So begins Paula Wall's funny, poignant, and sexy novel, The Rock Orchard. Musette Belle could lay her hand on a baby's heart and see his life as if he'd already lived it. Even in death, she continues to shock the good citizens of Leaper's Fork, Tennessee, and her descendents are doing their best to carry on her legacy.
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Laugh Out Loud
- By MaryRoseJ on 11-06-12
By: Paula Wall
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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The Lost Girls
- A Novel
- By: Heather Young
- Narrated by: Alice Rosengard, Laurel Schroeder
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family - her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine.
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Engaging story spanning three generations.
- By LilMissMolly on 09-23-16
By: Heather Young
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Heavy in My Heart
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Five very different women have married Jack Mauser, a charming, infuriating schemer whose passions never survive the long haul. Now, stranded in a North Dakota blizzard, they have come face-to-face—and each has an astonishing story to tell. Huddling for warmth, they pass the endless night by remembering the stories of how each came to love, marry, and ultimately move beyond Jack. At times painful, at times heartbreaking, and oftentimes comic, their tales become the adhesive that holds them together—in their love for Jack and in their lives as women.
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Beautiful
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When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe deposit box. There she records the truth about her life and her marriage, while turning her Red Diary - hidden where Gil will find it - into a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping listen.
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Enjoyed it until the ending
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Her name is Omakayas, or Little Frog, because her first step was a hop, and she lives on an island in Lake Superior. It is 1850 and the lives of the Ojibwe have returned to a familiar rhythm: they build their birchbark houses in the summer, go to the ricing camps in the fall to harvest and feast, and move to their cozy cedar log cabins near the town of LaPointe before the first snows.
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Beautiful book
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Four Souls & Tracks
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In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate on the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Louise Erdrich reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and these works are as beautiful and lyrical as anything she has written.
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Tracks and Four Souls
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Louise Erdrich's The Red Convertible
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Louise Erdrich ( The Plague of Doves) talks about her latest collection of stories with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! The book features skillfully woven, multigenerational stories of family entanglements, desperate passions, and dangerous choices. Sonia Manzano performs an excerpt.
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Disappointed
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The Birchbark House
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Omakakiins and her family live on an island in Lake Superior. Though there are growing numbers of white people encroaching on their land, life continues much as it always has. But the satisfying rhythms of their life are shattered when a visitor comes to their lodge one winter night, bringing with him an invisible enemy that will change things forever—but that will eventually lead Omakakiins to discover her calling.
By: Louise Erdrich
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Flights
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Chopin's heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.
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Curious and beautifully written
- By Alejandra on 10-24-18
By: Olga Tokarczuk, and others
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The Island of Sea Women
- A Novel
- By: Lisa See
- Narrated by: Jennifer Lim
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger. This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous, physical work, and the men take care of the children.
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Overly dramatic read
- By mary krause on 03-28-19
By: Lisa See
What listeners say about The Master Butcher's Singing Club
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Larry
- 01-09-05
Erdrich's
Louise Erdrich is a crafter of wonderful stories of the northern prairie. Her often quirky characters meander through sometimes bizarre plotscapes following trails of finely created prose toward a rich reading experience. The Master Butcher's Singing Club is, in my view, her finest book. It is doubly fortunate that Audible is offering the book unabridged AND that it is read by the author herself, in her very fine voice. The combination of drama and poetry, comedy and pathos, is just right, and I am pleased to have access to this novel, at last, through my Audible.com account.
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35 people found this helpful
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Overall
- JOHN
- 05-08-05
The Master Butcher's Snoring Club
I am surprised to see the glowing reviews listed here. Frankly, this book does not deserve them. True, the prose and language are somewhat engaging, but the author tends to take herself too seriously, droning on and on about people, places and things with barely any dialogue between characters. It seemed like I was halfway through this book before there were any characters speaking more than one or two sentences. As a result of this verbal vancancy, I found the book to lull me into a state of disinterest.
Not wanting to give away too much plot, I will simply mention that one of the characters is revealed to have done something quite surprising and seemingly without motive. There was really no development of this personality that would lead the reader/listener to even consider this act as requisite to any kind of evolution of the story line. The motive is NEVER explained in the least. And, as quickly as this event is brought to attention, it goes away with barely any significance to the rest of the book.
Like the Seinfeld Show, I found this almost to be a story about nothing. People doing what people do, and the author pleased with the sound of her own voice.
While not a terrible work, I found this book to be quite lacking and unsatisfying. True, Ms.Erdrich's voice and language are soothing and not unpleasant- sort of like a mild sedative. Zzzzzzzzzz
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Ann
- 03-08-05
Good Read (Listen)
At first a bit slow, but not dead, the narrator pulls you into the life and mind of the main character, Fidelis Voltsvogel. As you continue to listen, you begin to piece together the lives, thoughts and deeds of all of the characters. Each is described in great detail throughout the chapters with realistic flaws and captivating personalities.
This is a long one and enjoyable through every minute.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kindle Customer
- 06-03-06
Satisfying
I hesitated to read this book, because I felt I didn't always "get" Erdrich's books. But I found myself quickly drawn into the narrative, the time period, the portrayal of small-town-midwestern life, and most of all, into the personalities of the characters in this book. Plot points are resolved, not always in the happiest of ways, but in a way that was true to life. This book goes onto my all-time-favorites list.
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9 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Lisa
- 08-13-05
precious little
This book is so carefully wrapped it tends to be precious, and such careful attention to the packaging may be what makes it seem methodical. The problem is also exacerbated by the narrator, whose style is also very deliberate and restrained (although she might be good with a different book). Erdrich inserts bits of fashionable culture, such as juggling and circus perfomers, along with wandering counter culture homeless who are "really deep," which seems artificial and strained. However, the protagonist is well developed, and the portrait of midwestern America between the world wars feels real and interesting. Consequently, I kept waiting for the climax but was disappointed that the highly worked plot never really delivered.
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8 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Feltonjohn
- 09-27-10
terrible waste of time
I kept waiting for the various threads of the story to coalesce into a meaningful or at least purposeful whole. It never happened. Instead there is a series of misfortunes that befall the characters in this story, but none of them moves the overall narrative in any discernible direction. Overall a disappointing, depressing waste of a credit.
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- Julie W. Capell
- 06-03-09
Butchered singing
Maybe it was the author's slow, boring voice, but I thought this was one of the slowest and most boring books ever. There is really no main character. There is a weird murder-mystery thrown in but it really didn't add much to the story or the character development. The author makes many statements about the characters, i.e. saying that a character is "intellectually curious" but doesn't ever show the character being intellectually curious. The singing club of the title barely enters into the story. Long, drawn out side trips into the death by cancer of one character and the teenaged love life of another also fail to get the story going in a direction that makes sense. The language was unremarkable as well, making this one of the worst books I have "read" in years. Some people in my book club who read it in print really liked it, but I would definitely avoid the audio book.
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- vanessa
- 04-05-17
Collecting Truths... Breathe deep, this book heals.
Perhaps you keep a list of books to read when all of your hope has been slaughtered before the evening news? If so, add this volume to the medicine bottles on your nightstand; here is a book to call into prescient breath. A way to understand things that people remitted to the dust years ago-- very human, human things Mrs. Erdrich gives us, things more complicated than romance & mystery. Read this book, ok? Read this book & then keep on with your lungs. Yes.
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- Elizabeth
- 09-18-13
Horrible
What disappointed you about The Master Butcher's Singing Club?
The narration was awful! The author read in such an emotionless monotone that I couldn't listen to more than 20 minutes of the book.
What do you think your next listen will be?
Anything else!
How could the performance have been better?
She can stick to writing and not reading.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Anger that I wasted my money. I will read the book instead of listening to it.
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- Mark Van Wassenhove
- 09-01-22
Beautiful story, Beautiful voice
I loved this. I hated for it to end. Every character is so rich and believable.
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