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Casting Off
- A Memoir
- Narrated by: Elspeth Sandys
- Length: 7 hrs
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Casting Off
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Publisher's summary
At the end of the first volume of Elspeth Sandys’ absorbing memoir, What Lies Beneath, an adult Elspeth has solved the riddle of her birth parents and begun to piece together the events of her early life and find her place in the world.
Casting Off begins on the eve of Elspeth’s first marriage. She and her husband will soon depart New Zealand for England, joining a throng of Kiwis who chose to uproot themselves from their native land. New attachments will be formed: new loves of people and places that will take the place of the old. But the home country will continue to exercise a pull.
Backgrounding the personal story in this deeply satisfying memoir is the story of the Thatcher years and the creeping virus of neo-liberalism, the sexual revolution of the 60s, the beguiling world of books–reading and writing–and theatre. Elspeth Sandys’ refreshing honesty and her skill as a writer of fiction and drama propel the listener through an absorbing life story that is equally a commentary on the meaning of memoir and the peculiarities of memory.
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 117
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 89
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 91
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Flesh Wounds
- By: Richard Glover
- Narrated by: Richard Glover
- Length: 7 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 33
A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Such a Meaningful Reflection
- By Awarenessing on 11-28-15
By: Richard Glover
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Pearl Buck in China
- Journey to The Good Earth
- By: Hilary Spurling
- Narrated by: Hilary Spurling
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 71
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 56
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 53
The author of the much honored two-volume biography of Henri Matisse unearths the life and work of the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize winner Pearl Buck, whose novels in the 1930's and 40's were the first written for a Western audience to describe ordinary life in the still secret China of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very good
- By M. Brandman on 06-15-10
By: Hilary Spurling
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Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 34
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 32
Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
- By: Gerald Martin
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 22 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 57
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 61
In his novels and short stories, Gabriel García Márquez has transformed the particulars of his own life and the lives of his fellow Colombians into wondrous fiction. While telling the story of the sloppily dressed, skinny young man who rose from obscurity as a provincial journalist to international fame as the progenitor of a new literature, Gerald Martin also considers the tensions in García Márquez's life between celebrity and the personal quest for literary quality, between politics and writing, and between the seductions of power, solitude, and love.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great content, somewhat disappointing narrator.
- By Paola Herrington on 01-08-13
By: Gerald Martin
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The Sisters
- The Saga of the Mitford Family
- By: Mary S. Lovell
- Narrated by: Annie Wauters
- Length: 18 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 216
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Performance3.5 out of 5 stars 187
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Story4 out of 5 stars 189
This is the story of a close, loving family splintered by the violent ideologies of Europe between the wars. Jessica was a Communist; Debo became the Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy was one of the best-selling novelists of her day; the ethereally beautiful Diana was the most hated woman in England; and Unity Valkyrie, born in Swastika, Alaska, would become obsessed with Adolf Hitler.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great story, terrible reader
- By Victoria on 02-27-14
By: Mary S. Lovell
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Stalin's Daughter
- The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
- By: Rosemary Sullivan
- Narrated by: Karen Cass
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 205
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 184
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Story4 out of 5 stars 184
The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Insightful and thoroughly researched
- By Jean on 06-16-15
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Wait for Me!
- Memoirs
- By: Deborah Mitford Duchess of Devonshire
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 121
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 88
Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood that includes the writers Jessica and Nancy, who wrote when Deborah was born, "How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl." Deborah's effervescent memoir chronicles her remarkable life, from an eccentric but happy childhood in the Oxfordshire countryside, to tea with Adolf Hitler and her controversially political sister Unity in 1937, to her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The last of the Mitford Sisters
- By Irene on 01-11-11
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The Dark Flood Rises
- A Novel
- By: Dame Margaret Drabble
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 135
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 123
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Story4 out of 5 stars 124
Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Life Observed By An Exceptional Writer
- By Sara on 03-22-17
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The Last Love Song
- A Biography of Joan Didion
- By: Tracy Daugherty
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 26 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 77
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Spare
- By: Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex
- Narrated by: Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 69,134
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 63,903
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Story5 out of 5 stars 63,695
It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother’s coffin as the world watched in sorrow—and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling—and how their lives would play out from that point on.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Gutterball!
- By Jimmyjoejangles on 01-10-23
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Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty
- An Intimate Portrait of My Grandmother
- By: Kate Hennessy
- Narrated by: Randye Kaye
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 74
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 67
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 67
Dorothy Day (1897-1980) was a prominent Catholic, writer, social activist, and cofounder of a movement dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor. Her life has been revealed through her own writings as well as the work of historians, theologians, and academics. What has been missing until now is a more personal account from the point of view of someone who knew her well.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Great content.HORRIBLE Narration. Cannot listen.
- By Christian on 04-21-17
By: Kate Hennessy
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Reading My Father
- A Memoir
- By: Alexandra Styron
- Narrated by: Alexandra Styron
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 64
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 40
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Story4 out of 5 stars 38
Alexandra Styron's parents—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written with humor, compassion, and grace.
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5 out of 5 stars
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William Styron Ranks...
- By Douglas on 12-22-13
By: Alexandra Styron
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House of Dreams
- The Life of L.M. Montgomery
- By: Liz Rosenberg, Julie Morstad - illustrator
- Narrated by: Susan Hanfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 43
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 35
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Maud who adored stories. When she was fourteen years old, Maud wrote in her journal, "I love books. I hope when I grow up to be able to have lots of them." Not only did Maud grow up to own lots of books, she wrote twenty-four of them herself as L. M. Montgomery, the world-renowned author of Anne of Green Gables. For many years, her lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, her "year of mad passion" and her difficult married life were buried deep within her unpublished personal journals....
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5 out of 5 stars
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Home’o’dreams
- By Steve G. on 02-25-20
By: Liz Rosenberg, and others
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The Lost
- A Search for Six of Six Million
- By: Daniel Mendelsohn
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 22 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 177
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 162
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 159
The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust - an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Exquisite Narration, Breathtakingly Heartfelt Book
- By Gillian on 08-14-16