
A Brief History of Seven Killings
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By:
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Marlon James
About this listen
Winner, The Man Booker Prize, 2015
On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years.
Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters - assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts - A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James' place among the great literary talents of his generation.
©2014 Marlon James. Recorded by arrangement with Penguin Books. (P)2014 HighBridge, a division of Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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The Last Samurai
- By: Helen DeWitt
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Sibylla, an American-at-Oxford turned loose on London, finds herself trapped as a single mother after a misguided one-night stand. High-minded principles of child-rearing work disastrously well. J. S. Mill (taught Greek at three) and Yo Yo Ma (Bach at two) claimed the methods would work with any child; when these succeed with the boy Ludo, he causes havoc at school and is home again in a month. (Is he a prodigy, a genius? Readers looking over Ludo’s shoulder find themselves easily reading Greek and more.)
By: Helen DeWitt
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Runaway
- Stories
- By: Alice Munro
- Narrated by: Kymberly Dakin
- Length: 10 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Three stories concern the same woman - in the first, she escapes from teaching at a girls' school into a wild love affair; in the second, she returns with her child to the home of her parents, whose marriage she finally begins to examine; and in the last, her vanished child turns up caught in the grip of a religious cult. In these and other stories Alice Munro's understanding of the people about whom she writes makes their lives as real as our own.
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Poor Audio Quality
- By David on 04-02-10
By: Alice Munro
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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The Other Name
- Septology I-II
- By: Jon Fosse, Damion Searls - translator
- Narrated by: Kyle Snyder
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.
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Ear worms galore
- By ET on 10-10-23
By: Jon Fosse, and others
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The Old Drift
- A Novel
- By: Namwali Serpell
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh, Richard E. Grant, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
- Length: 24 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The year 1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families (black, white, brown) as they collide and converge over the course of the century, into the present and beyond.
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A saga of Africa and African immigrants
- By Books on our Brains Society/ Barbara on 08-02-19
By: Namwali Serpell
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Citizen
- An American Lyric
- By: Claudia Rankine
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 1 hr and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Claudia Rankine's bold new audiobook recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in 21st-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV - everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person's ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.
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Important Work But Audio Is Missing a Lot
- By David P on 08-30-17
By: Claudia Rankine
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We the Animals
- By: Justin Torres
- Narrated by: Frankie J. Alvarez
- Length: 3 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.
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I want my credit back!
- By Van Gilder on 09-02-11
By: Justin Torres
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Train Dreams
- A Novella
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 2 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world.
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2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist
- By Louis on 06-20-12
By: Denis Johnson
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Here Comes the Sun
- A Novel
- By: Nicole Dennis-Benn
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her forbidden love for another woman.
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Wow!!!
- By FirstLowell on 09-03-16
How could the performance have been better?
The performance detracts from a good book. The people reading have very fake Jamaican accents and its very distracting and sounds foolish. This problem is detrimental to an otherwise great book.Read the hard copy book. The performance sucks
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Nothing Brief About It
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Phenomenal
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Fantastic book and audiobook
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As an aside, I read this as I do many books, flipping back and forth from the book to the audio book. The performances in this audio book go beyond the usual idea of excellence, for their having an unmistakably deep rehearsal calendar behind them that better befits a big budget film. These actors have both the intricacies of their varied accents - out to the heaviest patois, as well as very well directed acting. The only thing holding me back from recommending the vocalised work over the printed one is that the writing of the dialect is beautiful too, and it is fun to read in the face of some struggle, until the accents 'pop' in your mind, and you are hearing voices from the text. Not reading. Wonderful work. Deserving of its prize. Has much-in its scope and feel- in common with other Man-Booker prize winning works I have also liked.
Deserving, so deserving. Violent, epic, glorious.
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Interesting
Intriguing
Fascinating
Exciting
informative
Excellent
Fantastic
Action Packed
Full of Excitement
Powerful
Fantastic Read
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Where does A Brief History of Seven Killings rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
To say this book is powerful would be an understatement. Words like riveting, all consuming, genius comes to mind. I believe that this will rank in my top 5 books I have ever listened to or read.Who was your favorite character and why?
Josey Wales and Kimmie's characters were my favorites because both characters were smart and danced to their own drummers. They were bold, unrepentant and took control of their own destinies. I had a lot of empathy for Wimper and Bam Bam and I was praying for a miracle so they wouldn't die.Which character – as performed by the narrators – was your favorite?
My favorite narrator performance was Whimper and Bam Bam - they had the true Jamaican accent and I really felt for them when they spoke.If you could take any character from A Brief History of Seven Killings out to dinner, who would it be and why?
I could only see myself sitting down with Alex the writer and the singer - the rest I would be too scared to meet.Any additional comments?
Buy this book - it is destined to be a classic. It is disturbing but riveting; the characters jump right out at you and you know them. Marlon James is a genius.A must read
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Good but a little hard to follow
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Good read!
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confusing, but the last few chapters are worth it
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