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Beirut Hellfire Society
- Narrated by: Ali Momen
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Finalist for Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
An explosive new novel from the award-winning, best-selling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach.
It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country's Civil War. On a torn-up street overlooking a cemetery in the city's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colourful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society - a secret group to which his father had belonged. The Society's purpose is to arrange burial or cremation for those who for various reasons have been outcast and abandoned by family, clergy, and state. Pavlov agrees to take up his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and fading community, bearing witness to its enduring rituals as well as its inevitable decline.
Deftly combining comedy with tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is at once propulsive, elegiac, outrageous, profane, and transcendent - a profoundly moving meditation on what it means to live through war. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death. Here is an exhilarating, subversive, beautiful and timely new work that reinforces Rawi Hage's status as one of our most original, necessary, fearless, and important writers.
Critic Reviews
- Finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
- Shortlisted for the 2018 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
- Shortlisted for the 2018 Quebec Writers' Federation Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction
- Longlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize
“Beirut Hellfire Society, if it is even possible, raises Hage’s game to sublime new heights in a moving, ultimately devastating treatise on war, death, morality, and sanity. Populating this world with a variety of misfits, rogues, lovers, and maniacs, Hage, like all great writers, approaches his subject from a fresh perspective, presenting the consequences of war in a fashion often breathtaking in its boldness. This is literary warfare via the unflinching realism of Erich Maria Remarque, the paranoia of Franz Kafka, and the absurdity of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Beirut Hellfire Society is...a stripping-back of the nature of story, and its episodic structure burns with its own fuel. The possibility of death lurks behind every utterance. Yet the novel as a whole is not one of bleakness but joy.” (2018 QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction jury citation)
“A novel of tragic beauty and dark humour that is comfortable with contradiction and charged with probing philosophical insights and the luminosity of Arabic poetry. It’s a timeless story of the outcast whose act of witness chronicles the world he observes. It is also a testament to love for life. Hage reminds us of what it takes for a novel to endure on the level of both form and content.” (Quill & Quire, starred review)
“For a novel that involves so much death and sadness, it is vibrant, very operatic and funny at times.... [A] very important book and a book very much about our times.” (CBC Radio)
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Story
Irene Beltrán is a force to be reckoned with. As a magazine journalist, an unusual profession for a woman with her privileged upbringing, she is constantly challenging the oppressive regime. Her investigative partner is photographer Francisco Leal, the son of impoverished Spanish Marxist émigrés. Together, they are an inseparable team and - despite Irene’s engagement to an army captain - form a passionate connection.
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Good story, but difficult to follow at times
- By Carmen on 04-21-20
By: Isabel Allende
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A Conspiracy of Mothers
- A Novel
- By: Colleen van Niekerk
- Narrated by: Kineta Kunutu
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The year is 1994, and South Africa is in political turmoil as its first democratic election looms. Against a backdrop of apartheid and racial violence, traumatized artist Yolanda Petersen returns from the Appalachian foothills to the land of her youth at the behest of her mother. While there Yolanda longs to reconnect with her estranged daughter, Ingrid, the product of an illegal mixed-race affair with a white man. But Ingrid is missing, and as Yolanda quickly discovers, she isn’t the only woman in Cape Town desperate to protect her own.
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Best Book I’ve Listened to in a Long Time
- By MicJor on 02-24-23
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The Infinite Plan
- A Novel
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Isabel Allende, Luis Moreno
- Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born in the Hispanic barrio of Los Angeles, Gregory Reeves grew up in poverty, survived the killing fields of Vietnam, and is now a lawyer in San Francisco. Though he has successfully survived this hard journey, Gregory’s life has suddenly gone off the rails thanks to an illusory and wrongheaded quest that has left him feeling lost and listless. To find what he is missing and what his heart truly wants, he must return to his roots. Only by excavating the past can he see the way to his future.
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Great story but too long
- By Ivan Colin on 01-08-23
By: Isabel Allende
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The First Man
- By: Albert Camus
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In The First Man, Albert Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds, and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. The result is a moving journey through the lost landscape of youth that also discloses the wellsprings of Camus's aesthetic powers and moral vision.
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Great Narration by Jefferson Mays
- By Sean Patrick Stevens on 07-31-21
By: Albert Camus
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A Lush and Seething Hell
- Two Tales of Cosmic Horror
- By: John Hornor Jacobs
- Narrated by: Almarie Guerra, MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
The award-winning and critically-acclaimed master of horror returns with a pair of chilling tales - both never-before-published in print or audio - that examine the violence and depravity of the human condition. Bringing together his acclaimed novella The Sea Dreams It Is the Sky and an all-new short novel My Heart Struck Sorrow, John Hornor Jacobs turns his fertile imagination to the evil that breeds within the human soul.
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Meh...
- By C Christopher Taylor on 01-08-20
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From These Broken Streets
- A Novel
- By: Roland Merullo
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Italy, 1943. The Nazi occupation has cemented its grip on the devastated city of Naples. Giuseppe DiPietra, a curator in the National Archives, has a subversive plan to aid the Allies. If he’s discovered, forced labor or swift execution. Lucia Pastone, secretary for the Italian Fascist government, is risking her own life in secret defiance of orders. And Lucia’s father, Aldo, is a black marketeer who draws Giuseppe and Lucia into the underworld - for their protection and to help plant the seeds of resistance.
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I’ve been to Naples and never knew any of this
- By paula wright on 12-30-20
By: Roland Merullo
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The Italian Girl's Secret
- By: Natalie Meg Evans
- Narrated by: Amalia Vitale
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Italy, 1943. For Carmela del Bosco, a farm girl in a remote Italian village, sheltering an English spy is the most dangerous thing she could do. If she’s caught by the fascists, it would be the end, especially for her beloved grandmother sleeping soundly upstairs. But taking in the pleading brown eyes of the man calling himself Sebastiano slumped at her door, and his terrible injuries inflicted by the Nazi occupiers, Carmela remembers how Nonna always taught her right from wrong. Risking everything, she hides him in a ruined tower on the edge of the farm.
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A very long waste of time
- By Bob L. on 10-04-22
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The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
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Overly ambitious
- By Turtle on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
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Girl
- A Novel
- By: Edna O'Brien
- Narrated by: Sheila Atim
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
"I was a girl once, but not anymore." So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood.
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Low quality. Hard to understand.
- By RS on 04-21-20
By: Edna O'Brien
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Once Night Falls
- By: Roland Merullo
- Narrated by: Angelo Di Loreto
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Italy, 1943. Luca Benedetto has joined the partisans in their fight against the German troops ravaging the shores of his town on Lake Como. While risking his life to free his country, Luca is also struggling to protect Sarah, his Jewish lover who’s hiding in a mountain cabin. As the violent Nazi occupation intensifies, Luca and Sarah fear for more than their own lives.
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Joe the Sicilian
- By Carolyn Covello on 12-16-19
By: Roland Merullo
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The Paris Hours
- A Novel
- By: Alex George
- Narrated by: Raphael Corkhill
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One day in the City of Lights. One night in search of lost time. Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost. Told over the course of a single day in 1927, The Paris Hours takes four ordinary people whose stories, told together, are as extraordinary as the glorious city they inhabit.
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A Fun Read
- By Meg on 05-16-20
By: Alex George
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The Longest Echo
- A Novel
- By: Eoin Dempsey
- Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan, Will Damron
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Occupied Italy, 1944. In the mountain regions south of Bologna, Liliana Nicoletti’s family finds escaped POW James Foley behind German lines. Committed to the anti-Fascist cause, they deliver him to a powerful band of local partisans. But when the SS launches a brutal attack against the Resistance, Liliana’s community is destroyed. Forging an unbreakable bond, James and Liliana's only hope of survival is to make it to the Allied lines. Twelve years later, fate reunites Liliana, newly widowed, and James, now a journalist for a New York magazine.
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Brilliant
- By Katherine on 02-20-21
By: Eoin Dempsey
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Anywhere but Home
- A Novel
- By: Daniel Speck, Jaime McGill - translator
- Narrated by: Will Damron, Angela Dawe
- Length: 17 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The English-language debut of the acclaimed international bestseller - Anywhere but Home crosses continents, cultures, and generations to tell a sweeping story of self-discovery, finding your own place in a new world, and the revelatory mysteries of being a family.
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A very complex story of family
- By Evelyn Schumacher on 12-30-21
By: Daniel Speck, and others
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Unholy Land
- By: Lavie Tidhar
- Narrated by: Andrew Fallaize
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When pulp-fiction writer Lior Tirosh returns to his homeland in East Africa, much has changed. Palestina - a Jewish state established in the early 20th century - is constructing a massive border wall to keep out African refugees. Unrest in the capital, Ararat, is at fever pitch. While searching for his missing niece, Tirosh begins to act as though he is a detective from one of his own novels. He is pursued by ruthless members of the state's security apparatus while unearthing deadly conspiracies and impossible realities.
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Which reality is real?
- By Michael G Kurilla on 10-17-20
By: Lavie Tidhar
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These Ghosts Are Family
- A Novel
- By: Maisy Card
- Narrated by: Karl O’Brian Williams
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Stanford Solomon’s shocking, 30-year-old secret is about to change the lives of everyone around him. Stanford has done something no one could ever imagine. He is a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. Stanford Solomon is actually Abel Paisley. And now, nearing the end of his life, Stanford is about to meet his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, a home health aide who has unwittingly shown up for her first day of work to tend to the father she thought was dead.
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Captivating
- By Jheryn on 04-18-20
By: Maisy Card