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My Beloved Life
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Amitava Kumar
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
An absorbing, exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man’s life, an ordinary life made exceptional by the fact that he has loved and has been loved in turn
Jadunath Kunwar’s beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. In 1935 in a village near George Orwell’s birthplace, Jadu’s mother, while pregnant with him, nearly dies from a cobra bite. When we see Jadu again, he is in college, meeting the Sherpa who first summited Everest and wondering what it means to be modern. As his life skates between the mythical and the mundane, and as changes big and small sweep across India, Jadu finds meaning in the most unexpected places. He befriends poets and politicians. He becomes a historian. And he has a daughter, Jugnu, a television journalist with a career in the United States—whose own story recasts the past in a new light.
Piercing, fleet-footed, and undeniably resonant, here is a novel from a singularly gifted writer about how we tell stories and write history, how individuals play a counterpoint to big movements, how no single life is without consequence.
Critic reviews
“Above all, [Amitava Kumar] new novel is deeply human; the heart is everywhere in these pages. It is easily the best thing Kumar has written . . . Its astonishing details sit in the text like little coiled stories, pointedly revealed but not overpoweringly unpacked by the writer . . . Kumar’s details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real . . . His beautiful, truthful fiction rings with all the gratitude and anticipated grief that he expressed in 2002, in Bombay London New York, when both of his parents were still alive . . . This novel finds and provides great strength—too late for Kumar’s parents, but in good time for his grateful readers.”
—James Wood, The New Yorker
“This profound book is full of lives whose beauty lies in the wholeness of their telling. A father, a daughter, a crime, a country being born, a migration, another country, a plague. ‘We are in touch with a great astonishing mystery when we put honest words down on paper to register a life and to offer witness. Everything else is ordinary,’ Kumar writes. His novel offers magnificent witness, and is not ordinary but extraordinary.” —Salman Rushdie
“What makes a life? My Beloved Life addresses this most fundamental of questions with all of Amitava Kumar’s trademark wisdom and wit. A novel of vaulting ambition and tenderness, about how histories, both personal and national, are built, refracted, and revised.” —Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies
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Performance
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Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures.
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Poetry of the Heart
- By Delphine C. Lucas on 04-29-24
By: Anne Michaels
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The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
- A Novel
- By: Janice Hallett
- Narrated by: Annie Aldington, Nneka Okoye, Gareth Armstrong, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the anti-Christ. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and mother and baby disappeared.
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Actor chewing noises disgusting. Did not finish.
- By Schwarzian on 03-12-24
By: Janice Hallett
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Help Wanted
- A Novel
- By: Adelle Waldman
- Narrated by: Amanda Ronconi
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement―including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.
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I thought it was pretty boring
- By Jay Magure on 05-07-24
By: Adelle Waldman
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Green Dot
- A Novel
- By: Madeleine Gray
- Narrated by: Sasha Simon
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she's preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him.
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great writing but horrible story
- By Nina Petelina on 05-08-24
By: Madeleine Gray
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After Annie
- A Novel
- By: Anna Quindlen
- Narrated by: Gilli Messer
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Annie Brown dies suddenly, her husband, her children, and her closest friend are left to find a way forward without the woman who has been the lynchpin of all their lives. Bill is overwhelmed without his beloved wife, and Annemarie wrestles with the bad habits her best friend had helped her overcome. And Ali, the eldest of Annie’s children, has to grow up overnight, to care for her younger brothers and even her father and to puzzle out for herself many of the mysteries of adult life. Over the course of the next year what saves them all is Annie.
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Quindlen’s latest
- By Anonymous User on 03-03-24
By: Anna Quindlen
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Slow Noodles
- A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes
- By: Chantha Nguon
- Narrated by: Kim Green, Clara Kim
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A haunting and beautiful memoir from a Cambodian refugee who lost her country and her family during Pol Pot's genocide in the 1970s but who finds hope by reclaiming the recipes she tasted in her mother's kitchen.
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Hauntingly beautiful, epic journey of resilience and human kindness
- By nameatrandom on 04-30-24
By: Chantha Nguon
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Butter
- A Novel of Food and Murder
- By: Asako Yuzuki
- Narrated by: Hanako Footman
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in the Tokyo Detention House convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, whom she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination, but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew, and Kajii can’t resist writing back.
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The universally complex interstice between males and females
- By Melinda on 04-24-24
By: Asako Yuzuki