• A Town Called Discovery

  • By: RR Haywood
  • Narrated by: Carl Prekopp
  • Length: 10 hrs
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (803 ratings)

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A Town Called Discovery  By  cover art

A Town Called Discovery

By: RR Haywood
Narrated by: Carl Prekopp
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Publisher's summary

A new time-travel thriller from Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Amazon and Audible best-selling author R. R. Haywood. Creator of the smash-hit time-travel series Extracted and the UK’s number one horror series The Undead.

A man falls from the sky. He has no memory. He has no sense of self. What lies ahead are a series of tests, each more brutal than the last, and if he gets through them all, he might just reach a town called Discovery.

©2020 RR Haywood (P)2020 Audible, Ltd

What listeners say about A Town Called Discovery

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

More please

I have been a bit of a fan of R.R Haywood for sometime. However, I started to wane as the ‘Undead’ series began to drag on a bit too much for my liking. For me the shine of Mr Haywood had been a little tarnished. But! Holy cow batman. He is back to being the legend I thought he was! With this new one ‘A Town Called Discovery’. Right from the very start I knew I would not be pushing it aside. I liked it so much, that I gave up riding my motorcycle to work, just so I could drive my car and listen to this one! That is the highest praise I could possibly think of!

The narration is by Carl Prekoop who narrated the ‘Extracted’ series by Haywood. Another one of my favourites. Somehow Carl’s narration always seem to be a perfect match for the characters created by Haywood. Many titles have to be sped up. However, not with this one. The speed is excellent in the narration.

I choose this title without reading any reviews, and had to work hard at not reading any while I was listening to it. Just in case a spoiler made it in the review. This is the sort of story that the listener is best to experience without any sort of hint in regards to story line or even subject matter. The mystery creates a lot of the enjoyment. I will tell you that the ‘not knowing’ feeling helps in understanding the feelings of the characters in the story. I seriously did not see the subject/plot coming in this one, it kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. This desire to know only increased my fondness for the title! I am so glad I discovered this one!

Please let there be another one Mr Haywood!

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46 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Action, action and more action

I have to catch my breath. That was one EFFED UP book.

It's time travel. It's chasing and fighting. It's unimaginable gore. It's death, but then it's not. It's constant, reeling, lurching action.

It's all of this, from the first page to the last.

And somehow it's also a romance, but not like any romance I've ever encountered. I seem to recall an old song saying "you always hurt the one you love, the one you shouldn't hurt at all". Kind of fits here, but with that brutality cranked up to 11.

Now I want more. Please tell me there's going to be a sequel, a chance for Discovery to battle Freedom. I am READY.

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23 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Too descriptive

I have read/listened to many a violent and bloody book in my days but this one--at least for me--was over the top. I listened for the first hour or so but finally had to shut it down. It also didn't make very much sense to me.

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19 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars
  • NS
  • 12-09-20

Incredibly Disappointing!

The narration by Carl Prekopp was phenomenal...but the underlying story was honestly SO disappointing!

Haywood’s prior “Extraction” trilogy was truly a BRILLIANT work... so when “Discovery” came out, I bought it immediately (both Kindle and Audible)....thinking that it would be just as great, and similar to the cleverness and fantastic writing of Extraction.

Unfortunately, only part of this book was interesting and compelling to read/listen to....honestly, by the end of the book, I was starting not to care about the characters and I was so disappointed that it completely just fizzled out in terms of its story line (and instead, it just hid the lack of good story telling with lots of violent battles, which get described in agonizing detail.)

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON:

The book starts out pretty interesting, although it gets incredibly frustrating when the characters don’t react the way actual people would in various situations....starting right after Bear arrives in the Town of Discovery.

But the biggest problem with this whole book is the CONTINUOUS reliance on the GIGANTIC (and frankly poorly-thought-out) MacGuffin.... a near-omnipotent AI controlling a matrix-like world to bring back people from the past to save the future of the human race in real life (but then has them live in a small town, work mundane jobs, and use “money” to buy anything).

But a MacGuffin is supposed to simply set up the main plot or scenario, and then it’s supposed to fade in importance as the story goes along! But the problem with this story is that the MacGuffin NEVER goes away, and instead, it gets relaxed upon even more, and gets more integrated into the story...but without ever providing any real description or understanding of the “how & why”. When you have an omnipotent character who does things “just because”, the underlying story becomes pointless.

Two other factors made it very difficult to feel empathy for the protagonist Bear, or for any his friends (or anyone else, especially Rossi):

1. The fact is that we have zero background on who these people are, and they have no idea who they are...I kept thinking that eventually we’d learn something of their “real” selves....but we’re supposed to empathize with these characters who have no backstory, have no real personalities (other than “she’s inquisitive” or “he’s funny”.). We’re supposed to care for them simply because they quip a few funny jokes, or have good skills at something. I understand the whole ”blank slate” idea, but by by never filling in the characters, we have no reason to care about them.

2. Almost nobody has reacts to situations naturally, and they do and say things that nobody would do in real life (even someone with complete amnesia would act more rationally than some of these characters). While the characters actions — both trivial and things critical to the plot — may be “exciting” or “funny” or whatever, they are often so far from what a real person would do in that scenario, that it was impossible to be relate, or to care whether someone survives or gets their brains blown out

One huge example is Bear’s sudden and never-ending “love” of Roshi — something that drives his actions throughout the whole book. Especially over the the last 1/3 of the book, Bear acts as if he’s lost his long-term soul-mate who had spent a lifetime together....rather than being two people who have barely spent ANY time with each other (I’m sorry, but fighting and bloodily killing each other does not bond people into loving relationships the way Haywood says, and doesn’t count as “sharing all their blood and various bodily fluids”). Yes, I believe in “love at first sight”, but if that love is never filled in by quality time together, it’s simply an unhealthy obsession that is hard to feel sad about (much less, be worthy enough to drive the storyline of an entire novel).

Overall, the story and the characters had SUCH promise...but something must have happened (like an editor who was afraid to criticize the manuscript too much, or a tight publishing deadline....or SOMETHING like that), and as a result, Haywood gave us a story that feels tantalizingly close to great, but which simply falls flat because of the lack of character development and the failure to move the story along with substance (rather than constantly going back to the inadequately explained MacGuffin). As a result, Despite Prekopp’s valiant attempt to make this Audible story compelling, I just cannot recommend this book at all.

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16 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    2 out of 5 stars
  • KM
  • 09-26-20

Good for Gamers -spoiler alert

This book is like watching level after level of a video game where your character keeps dying until you figure out how to get to the next level. I stopped listening about the time the walking dead children came after him.

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14 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

NEVER disappoints!

I’m staring at this flashing cursor wondering if I can write a R.R. Haywood recommendation without sounding like a lovestruck teenager. Yeah, I can, but that will cut it short: Strong characters, a killer sense of humor, stories that suck you in from the start. His works are my favorite escape. Add Carl Prekopp and you have perfection.

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13 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Weird, but in a good way.

This isn't *exactly* a time travel book, so get that idea out of your head straight away and you'll enjoy this one a lot more! That being said, it IS one of the most F'ed up love stories I've ever read. All the characters are interesting and weird. The MC's have unique and diverse personalities. And the best part is, there are so many questions left when it ends!
Get this one. Just DO IT!

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11 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

If the absence of plot doesn’t bother you...

It saddens me a bit to review “A Town Called Discovery” because I generally try, in my reviews, to say something positive about a book before noting it’s flaws. Since there is very little in the way of plot this book fills its pages with endless repetitions. Phrases recur like advertising jingles, and if one went over the text with a synonym remover or an adjective strainer there would be very little left. I’m not sure why, but I labored through the book to its (predictable) end. In retrospect, the ordeal was not worth the effort.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Never locked into a story.

Close to 100 books on audible for me and out of them all this was the worst. Too many characters, very poor performance, barely a story, and what story there is doesn't have any relevance until the 3rd to last chapter. I should have returned it a few chapters in but I kept thinking it was going to get better. It never did.

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8 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Engaging listen

I rarely write reviews as I don't write eloquently and I don't have a background in writing to be able to critique a book. But, for the first time in a long time, this story really grabbed me from the start and kept my attention throughout the book. I have listened to so many books that I was about to cancel my audible membership because I was thinking that I have gotten numb to just listening passively to a book. But I am thinking that the books that I have been buying just are not getting my attention any longer and I am just using them to fill the void with noise. But this book woke me up and made me remember how engaging a book can be when it fits my interest. I enjoyed the book enough that I would stop listening if I found my mind wandering or if something grabbed my attention so that I wouldn't miss any part of it.

Thanks for a book that reminded me of why I choose books for my entertainment over movies and video games.

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6 people found this helpful