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An Artist of the Floating World
- Narrated by: David Case
- Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
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An Artist of the Floating World
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Publisher's summary
From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day
In the face of the misery in his homeland, the artist Masuji Ono was unwilling to devote his art solely to the celebration of physical beauty. Instead, he put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II.
Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the "floating world" - the nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink - offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 1,015
Damian Baxter is hugely wealthy and dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, England, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern--his fortune in excess of 500 million and who should inherit it on his death.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Read Snobs instead
- By cristina on 02-14-13
By: Julian Fellowes
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The Enchanted April
- By: Elizabeth von Arnim
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 815
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 602
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 601
This is a journey of both escape and discovery for four exquisitely different women, a month of bliss and privacy for four weary souls. Their refuge on the Italian Riviera provides the perfect backdrop for a story about the search for spiritual harmony within and without.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Excellent book, excellent narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 02-26-05
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The Castle
- By: Franz Kafka
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 142
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 121
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Story4 out of 5 stars 119
A land-surveyor, known only as K., arrives at a small village permanently covered in snow and dominated by a castle to which access seems permanently denied. K.'s attempts to discover why he has been called constantly run up against the peasant villagers, who are in thrall to the absurd bureaucracy that keeps the castle shut, and the rigid hierarchy of power among the self-serving bureaucrats themselves.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A masculine and coquettish reading
- By Alan on 05-27-12
By: Franz Kafka
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The Unsettled Dust
- By: Robert Aickman
- Narrated by: Reece Shearsmith
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 41
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Story4 out of 5 stars 35
Robert Aickman, the supreme master of the supernatural, brings together eight stories in which strange things happen that the reader is unable to predict. His characters are often lonely and middle-aged, but all have the same thing in common: they are brought to the brink of an abyss that shows how terrifyingly fragile our piece of mind actually is. 'The Unsettled Dust', 'The House of the Russians', 'No Stronger Than a Flower', 'The Cicerones' and 'Ravissante' first appeared in the Sub Rosa collection in 1968, but the stories were published together as The Unsettled Dust in 1990.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Perfectly read, sheds new light on this work
- By James Townsend on 04-10-17
By: Robert Aickman
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The Bostonians
- By: Henry James
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 24
Taking place in Boston, Massachusetts, a decade after the Civil War, The Bostonians tells the story of two cousins who battle for the affections of and control over an enchanting prophetess. While visiting his cousin Olive Chancellor, a fierce feminist deeply involved in the Suffragette movement, Basil Ransom, a Confederate Civil War veteran turned lawyer, attends a speech by the talented young orator Verena Tarrant. Basil quickly falls in love with Verena, although he disagrees with her politics; Olive, however, sees her as the future of the women's rights movement.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A satire that turns tragic
- By Tad Davis on 08-23-20
By: Henry James
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Outline
- The Outline Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Kate Lock
- Length: 7 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 33
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 33
A man and a woman are seated next to each other on a plane. They get to talking - about their destination, their careers, their families. Grievances are aired, family tragedies discussed, marriages and divorces analyzed. An intimacy is established as two strangers contrast their own fictions about their lives. Outline is a novel in 10 conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Excruciating
- By Devoted Online Shopper on 03-15-23
By: Rachel Cusk
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The Ambassadors
- By: Henry James
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 18 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4 out of 5 stars 58
Lambert Strether, a mild, middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs. Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure and to bring him home. But Strether finds Chad transformed by the influence of a remarkable woman.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Henry James can be hard to follow but worth it
- By Patricia on 01-29-13
By: Henry James
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In the Light of What We Know
- By: Zia Haider Rahman
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 90
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 82
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Story4 out of 5 stars 82
One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power.
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1 out of 5 stars
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dreadful
- By sam on 06-05-15
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Swann's Way (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Marcel Proust, Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff - translator
- Narrated by: Tim Bruce
- Length: 20 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 21
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 19
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Story4 out of 5 stars 20
When the narrator of Swann's Way dips a petite madeleine into hot tea, the act transports him to his childhood in the French town of Combray. Out of his Pandora's box of reflections comes a memory of an old family friend, Swann - a man who was long ago undone by romantic desire and cruel reality. In this reverie lie the insights the author seeks about his own life and ageless truths about the ephemeral nature of emotions, places, and, ultimately, love.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Gasping for air!
- By Tom Dolan on 01-03-19
By: Marcel Proust, and others
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The Turmoil
- By: Booth Tarkington
- Narrated by: Harry Shaw
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 2
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 2
Bigger, newer, faster. Demolish and rebuild, then demolish and rebuild again. Smoke, soot, and noise are the badges of prosperity, and growth is for growth's sake.
By: Booth Tarkington
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The Jewel in the Crown
- Raj Quartet
- By: Paul Scott
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 269
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 237
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 237
In the India of 1942, two rapes take place simultaneously - that of an English girl in Mayapore, and that of India by the British. In each, physical violence, racial animosity, the coercion of the weak by the strong all play their part, but playing a part too are love, affection, loyalty, and recognition that the last division of all to be overcome is the colour of the skin.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This is one to get
- By Jeremy on 10-28-14
By: Paul Scott
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Heat and Dust
- By: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
- Narrated by: Julie Christie
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 82
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4 out of 5 stars 68
In 1923 the beautiful, spoiled, and bored Olivia, married to Douglas and his career in the Indian Civil Service, outrages the English and Indian communities by eloping with an Indian prince. Fifty years later, Douglas’s granddaughter, armed with Olivia’s letters, goes back to the heat and dust and squalor of the bazaars to find out for herself how Olivia could have been so affected by India that she turned her back on her own country.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Short, Rich Novel
- By David P on 01-23-22
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To Sir, with Love
- By: E. R. Braithwaite
- Narrated by: Ben Onwukwe
- Length: 6 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 73
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Story5 out of 5 stars 73
With opportunities for black men limited in post-World War II London, Rick Braithwaite, a former Royal Air Force pilot and Cambridge-educated engineer, accepts a teaching position that puts him in charge of a class of angry, unmotivated, bigoted white teenagers whom the system has mostly abandoned. When his efforts to reach these troubled students are met with threats, suspicion, and derision, Braithwaite takes a radical new approach. He will treat his students as people poised to enter the adult world.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great book!
- By Lionsroar on 12-08-18
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The Island
- By: Victoria Hislop
- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 55
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 50
On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding plans a trip to her mother's childhood home in Plaka, Greece hoping to unravel Sofia's hidden past. Given a letter to take to Sofia's old friend, Fotini, Alexis is promised that through Fotini, she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the deserted island of Spinalonga—Greece's former leper colony. Fotini reveals the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war, and passion.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Good story
- By Sweet Athena Creative on 04-19-24
By: Victoria Hislop