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The Mystic Masseur
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
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The Mystic Masseur
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Publisher's summary
The first of Naipaul's 12 novels tells of one man's meteoric rise and hilarious metamorphosis from failed schoolteacher and struggling masseur to the most popular man in Trinidad.
In this slyly funny and lavishly inventive novel, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul traces the unlikely career of Ganesh Ramsumair, a failed schoolteacher and impecunious village masseur who in time becomes a revered mystic, a thriving entrepreneur, and the most beloved politician in Trinidad. To understand a little better, one has to realize that in the 1940s masseurs were the island's medical practitioners of choice. As one character observes, "I know the sort of doctors they have in Trinidad. They think nothing of killing two, three people before breakfast."
Ganesh's ascent is variously aided and impeded by a Dickensian cast of rogues and eccentrics. There's his skeptical wife, Leela, whose schooling has made her excessively fond of punctuation marks, and Leela's father, Ramlogan, a man of startling mood changes and an ever-ready cutlass. There's the aunt known as The Great Belcher. There are patients pursued by malign clouds or afflicted with an amorous fascination with bicycles. Witty, tender, filled with the sights, sounds, and smells of Trinidad's dusty Indian villages, The Mystic Masseur is Naipaul at his most expansive and evocative.
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 724
Set in contemporary San Francisco and in a Chinese village where Peking Man is being unearthed, The Bonesetter's Daughter is an excavation of the human spirit: the past, its deepest wounds, its most profound hopes. Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club, brilliantly presents "storytelling in its oldest and truest form".
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5 out of 5 stars
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Exceptionally good
- By Eileen Finn on 03-25-03
By: Amy Tan
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Peyton Place
- By: Grace Metalious
- Narrated by: Tim O'Connor
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 384
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 293
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 299
In 1956, when this novel was first published, communities all over New England snapped up copies to see if they were the town portrayed in the book. Peyton Place is the story of a repressive New England town known for its high standards of public morality, and the steamy sexual activities that take place behind its bedroom doors.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Best book I've read to date!
- By Crusader on 11-07-11
By: Grace Metalious
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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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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 63
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
"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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5 out of 5 stars
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Another winner by Norah Lofts
- By Bird Lady 147 on 10-03-17
By: Norah Lofts
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 70
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 49
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Story4 out of 5 stars 51
Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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Gloria
- By: Kerry Young
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 29
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 27
Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Awesome story! And Robin Miles is a star!!
- By atlfolk on 06-23-18
By: Kerry Young
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Brick Lane
- By: Monica Ali
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Sastre
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Abridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 236
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 91
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Story4 out of 5 stars 94
Nanzeen's inauspicious birth in a Bangladeshi village imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents. Married off to a man old enough to be her father, Nanzeen moves to London and cares for her family. But gradually she begins to question whether fate controls her or whether she has a hand in her own destiny. She discovers both the complexity that comes with free choice and the depth of her attachment to her husband, her daughters and her new world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A truly wonderful book!
- By A M on 11-24-03
By: Monica Ali
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The Book of Ebenezer le Page
- By: G. B. Edwards
- Narrated by: Roy Dotrice
- Length: 21 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 247
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 225
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 223
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late 20th century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between England and France yet a world away from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the story of those he has known.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I miss Ebenezer
- By Mel on 01-15-18
By: G. B. Edwards
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East of the Sun
- By: Julia Gregson
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 157
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 108
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Story4 out of 5 stars 109
Autumn 1928. Three young women are on their way to India, each with a new life in mind. Rose, a beautiful but naive bride-to-be, is anxious about leaving her family and marrying a man she hardly knows. Victoria, her bridesmaid couldn't be happier to get away from her overbearing mother, and is determined to find herself a husband. And Viva, their inexperienced chaperone, is in search of the India of her childhood, ghosts from the past and freedom.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Indian history takes a back seat to 3 young women
- By Richard on 05-24-16
By: Julia Gregson
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Mr. Fox
- A Novel
- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 102
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 91
Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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2 out of 5 stars
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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The Invisible Wall
- A Love Story That Broke Barriers
- By: Harry Bernstein
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 422
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 244
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 246
This enchanting true story, written when the author was 93, is a moving tale of working-class life, the social divide, and forbidden love on the eve of the first World War. The narrow street on which Harry grew up appeared identical to countless other working-class English neighborhoods, except for the invisible wall that ran down the center of the street, dividing the Jewish families on one side from the Christians on the other.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Powerful Tale
- By Sara on 11-29-13
By: Harry Bernstein
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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
- By: Mordecai Richler
- Narrated by: David Julian Hirsh
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 80
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 67
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 67
Duddy - the third generation of a Jewish immigrant family in Montreal - is combative, amoral, scheming, a liar, and totally hilarious. From his street days tormenting teachers at the Jewish academy to his time hustling four jobs at once in a grand plan to "be somebody", Duddy learns about living - and the lesson is an outrageous roller-coaster ride through the human comedy.
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3 out of 5 stars
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OK but a bit disappointing; weak narration
- By Merlin on 05-12-17
By: Mordecai Richler
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
- By: Betty Smith
- Narrated by: Kate Burton
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7,970
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 6,649
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6,612
A moving coming-of-age story set in the 1900s, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the lives of 11-year-old Francie Nolan, her younger brother Neely, and their parents, Irish immigrants who have settled in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Johnny Nolan is as loving and fanciful as they come, but he is also often drunk and out of work, unable to find his place in the land of opportunity.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Book: flawless. SKIP THE RECORDED INTRO!!
- By Wild Wise Woman on 09-04-11
By: Betty Smith
-
Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 527
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 456
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 452
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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Augustown
- By: Kei Miller
- Narrated by: Dona Croll
- Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 124
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 111
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 112
Ma Taffy may be blind, but she sees everything. So when her great-nephew Kaia comes home from school in tears, what she senses sends a deep fear running through her. While they wait for his mama to come home from work, Ma Taffy recalls the story of the flying preacherman and a great thing that did not happen. A poor suburban sprawl in the Jamaican heartland, Augustown is a place where many things that should happen don't, and plenty of things that shouldn't happen do.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
SUPERB
- By ** on 06-25-17
By: Kei Miller
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The Jew Store
- A Family Memoir
- By: Stella Suberman
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 72
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 67
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 67
In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.
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5 out of 5 stars
-
Wonderful
- By Katie Simpson on 09-04-21
By: Stella Suberman
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"A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more." But to its residents, this derelict corner of Trinidad's capital is a complete world, where everybody is quite different from everybody else. In this tender, funny early novel, V. S. Naipaul renders their lives (and the legends their neighbors construct around them) with Dickensian verve and Chekhovian compassion.
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3 out of 5 stars
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What listeners say about The Mystic Masseur
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- OliviaL
- 05-03-22
V S Naipaul
Naipaul is amazing. The reader did a good job. Sometimes I wish a Trinidadian reader could have been used to get some of the terms and expressions correctly - but then again, I am Trinidadian, so I would pick up on those things. But as a presentation to a wider audience, Naipaul’s work, thru Ron Butler, still shines.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Joan
- 09-23-19
Pretty Good
The narrating is excellent and the best part of this book. While the story is amusing and the characters well presented and memorable in their own right, I did not find this work as satisfying as I expected given the talents of it author. A pleasant way to spend time, but not thought provoking or compelling.
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2 people found this helpful