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A Reliable Wife
- Narrated by: Mark Feuerstein
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
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Editorial reviews
Stinging needles of snow plunge rural Wisconsin into isolating despair as this erotic psychological thriller unravels in the autumn of 1907. Wealthy businessman Ralph Truitt, remote and severe, awaits his dowdy mail-order bride on a gloomy railroad platform, too restrained even to shiver in public. "I am a simple honest woman," she has written him.
When glossy-haired Catherine Land, his young wife-to-be, slips off the train, she collapses Ralph with her unexpected beauty and stillness. Ralph, in turn, shatters Catherine with his growly security and kindness. Each is deceiving the other. Tony Moretti, Ralph's ruthless estranged son, eventually sinks their schemes. A Reliable Wife is Gothic suspense, so secrets leak, blood spills, arsenic drips, and past wrongs are avenged.
Novelist Robert Goolrick knots chilling plot twists with ruined characters. Brittle Catherine buries her depraved adulthood by cloning the "manners of her fellow travelers exactly", down to cleaning her own hairbrush so maids will remark on her good breeding. She holes up in public libraries and steams through encyclopedias and card catalogs, collecting facts for her reinvention as a virginal missionary's daughter. Ralph punishes his roaring sensuality with ice water and listless dinner parties. He is a joyless grind. Love, meanwhile, bores Tony with its "lack of event...the same steady heartbeat".
Mark Feuerstein narrates A Reliable Wife in hypnotic murmurs to resist competing with Goolrick's lush, poetic language and explicit sexual dialogue. He bundles his velvety reading voice into a steady purr, lulling and tranquilizing against overwrought subtexts of hysteria. Feuerstein is unhurried, though never halting. He chronicles Catherine and Ralph's broken tangle with unadorned inflections and conspiratorial silences. Feuerstein invests his characters with authentic hearts, even if they, themselves, are not in true possession of one. Nita Rao
Publisher's summary
Critic reviews
"This darkly nuanced psychological tale builds to a strong and satisfying close." ( Publishers Weekly)
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Set in the 1950’s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin’s now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
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Baldwin: sensational. Butler: great. One caveat.
- By Music Man on 06-28-14
By: James Baldwin
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The Gods of Tango
- A Novel
- By: Carolina De Robertis
- Narrated by: Carolina De Robertis
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, carrying only a small trunk and her father's cherished violin, leaves her Italian village for a new home, and a new husband, in Argentina. Arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that he has been killed, but she remains: living in a tenement, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. Still, she is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets.
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A rousing tale
- By Jean on 07-24-15
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The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre
- By: Dominic Smith
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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In this luminous novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life of one of photography's founding fathers. In 1839, Louis Daguerre's invention took the world by storm. A decade later, he is sinking deep into delusions brought on by exposure to mercury, the very agent that allowed his daguerreotype process. Believing the world will end within one year, he creates his "Doomsday List", 10 items he must photograph before the final day. It includes a woman he has always loved but has not seen in half a century.
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Dud
- By Deborah on 01-31-08
By: Dominic Smith
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Sula
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- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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The Passion
- By: Jeanette Winterson
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- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
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Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meets their singular destiny.
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Excellence.
- By Scottie V. on 10-07-19
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The Fortunate Pilgrim
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Lucia Santa has traveled 3,000 miles of dark ocean, from the mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York, hoping for a better life. Instead, she finds herself in Hell's Kitchen, in a bad marriage, raising six children on her own. As Lucia struggles to hold her family together, her daughter confronts the adult world of work and romance while her eldest son is drawn into the Mafia. Meanwhile, her youngest son aspires to American pursuits she cannot understand.
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Puzo's Best
- By Amazon Customer on 02-19-13
By: Mario Puzo
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The Essex Serpent
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When Cora Seaborne's brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at 19, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive 11-year old son, Francis, and the boy's nanny, Martha.
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Unbearable Narrator
- By ACB on 06-08-17
By: Sarah Perry
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Mr. Fox
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- By: Helen Oyeyemi
- Narrated by: Carol Boyd
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Fairy-tale romances end with a wedding and the fairy tales don't get complicated. In this book, celebrated writer Mr. Fox can't stop himself from killing off the heroines of his novels, and neither can his wife, Daphne. It's not until Mary, his muse, comes to life and transforms him from author into subject that his story begins to unfold differently....
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A Great Novel, just Poor for Audio
- By James A. Dittes on 08-13-16
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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To Taste the Wine
- By: Fern Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 11 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Chelsea Myles earns her living as an actress with her uncle's theater troupe, performing cheap plays on the streets of London and picking the customers' pockets. Until one night, a robbery goes awry and Chelsea is left holding a purse with enough gold to buy her passage to Australia, and the chance of a fresh start. Once on board the vessel, Chelsea is intrigued by a fellow passenger, Quaid Tanner, who is returning to his vineyard in Australia. As much as Quaid admires the feisty, courageous Chelsea, circumstances seem destined to keep them apart.
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Great story but too detailed in sex scenes for me
- By Private on 09-23-15
By: Fern Michaels
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Claude & Camille
- A Novel of Monet
- By: Stephanie Cowell
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In the mid-19th century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his fathers nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his fathers will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris.
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As a painter
- By janice hedwall on 03-08-16
By: Stephanie Cowell
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East of the Sun
- By: Julia Gregson
- Narrated by: Tania Rodrigues
- Length: 19 hrs and 36 mins
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Autumn 1928. Three young women are on their way to India, each with a new life in mind. Rose, a beautiful but naive bride-to-be, is anxious about leaving her family and marrying a man she hardly knows. Victoria, her bridesmaid couldn't be happier to get away from her overbearing mother, and is determined to find herself a husband. And Viva, their inexperienced chaperone, is in search of the India of her childhood, ghosts from the past and freedom.
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Indian history takes a back seat to 3 young women
- By Richard on 05-24-16
By: Julia Gregson
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What listeners say about A Reliable Wife
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Pamela Harvey
- 10-16-09
Homage to Walt
...Whitman, that is.
I enjoyed this read, in spite of its retro aspect. I usually avoid novels that are dated pre-2000, but this book held my attention. It's very evident that the author's prose style is heavily influenced by the work of Walt Whitman, with all the richly layered series of descriptions and details. It's also a very visual narrative style and many scenes come together like a still life painting.
The story line is quite powerful and is based on a woman in charge of her destiny. She decides what she wants, formulates her plan and delegates the players within that. Revolutionary for 1907. Thus I felt that the narrator should have been female, instead of the scratchy-voiced older male - although he did lend a "period piece" quality to the reading.
I even liked the narrative style - a bit "stream-of-consciousness" for me, but here it seemed to work.
The reason I give this book only 3 vs 4-5 stars is the preponderance of the customary male pre-occupation with sex and sensuality. There seems to be way too much time and energy devoted to this aspect of human interaction, and I found myself resenting the long sexually descriptive passages, as though they were taking time away from possibly more interesting (to me) topics. I realize this may sound sexist or prudish - and I am the exact opposite - but there is generally a different focus among male vs. female writers in this department. Exceptions abound, of course. The work of Wally Lamb (among others) comes to mind.
Or, regarding the heavily layered sensuality in the book, perhaps there just was nothing more to describe vis-a-vis recreation during a 1907 Wisconsin winter. No internet, email, even telephone conversations. Not that these characters would indulge in video games or online scrabble.
But, on balance I'll give this one a "go".
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21 people found this helpful
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Overall
- R. Law
- 05-08-09
Intriguing story but only average writing
The premise of this book is very interesting (I'd sum it up as "sexual sociopaths in turn of the century Wisconsin"), as is much of the detail the author imagines for the characters, however it's clear that a more capable writer would have delivered a far more compelling story: there are a number of inconsistencies in the story where a character thinks or acts as if they don't know some crucial detail about another character, only to have it revealed later that they knew all along. It happens with enough frequency in the story as to be distracting and ultimately to make conclusion of the book pretty clumsy.
That said, it's a good read, er, listen and is well narrated. For pure escapism you could do worse. Be prepared for a lot of rather explicit and not always savory sex -- the author seems to be downright obsessed.
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18 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Rebecca
- 05-06-09
Strange but lovely
This book is for lovers of "literary fiction" (things like Ian McEwan though this is a much smaller scale); it's not for those looking for a mystery/thriller. The flawed protagonists drew me in and the end was satisfying.
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16 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Katydid65
- 04-30-09
Reliable Wife
I thought this was a beautiful book. It was a mystery - and it did in did dig deep into the characters past, present and maybe future. It was the old story good versus evil that live within us all. It was a story of forgiveness - of others an of oneself. The words were musical and the narrator's cadence was perfect. I could not stop listening to it. It gets an A from me - it has been a long time since I have heard such a good book.
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16 people found this helpful
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- Jim "The Impatient"
- 03-17-12
skin like oiled earth
Ever wonder what a book would be like if there were no good guys, where everyone was not only flawed, but down right nasty ugly? This is it. Every character in this book is mean and nasty. They care for no one but themselves and I did not care for any of them. I listened to four and a half hours and could not listen to any more. The farther along the book went, the more I hated every single character in the book.
The book is filled with lots of imagery and prose like a woman whose skin is like oiled earth.
This is the punk music of literature.
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13 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Kim
- 12-11-09
Dreadful
A ridiculous nonsensical story of three personality free individuals as told through their own disjointed ramblings and punctuated by the impatient, petulant barking of the narrator (a technique which he employs to express every human emotion). I can't believe I listened to the whole thing. It doesn't get better, people. It just gets worse and worse. Utterly pointless.
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13 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Scarlet
- 06-04-09
Don't rely on the jacket (a great book)
It looks like you either love or hate this book, and I am one who loved it. I purchased it because I expected to read an interesting cat and mouse game between two devious people. It is not. As someone already mentioned, this is a character study and quite a bit about redemption and whether one can atone for or outrun the past. I will not tell you whether the answer is yes or no, but I will tell you I cared deeply about the characters and how the story was going to turn out at several points along the way and barely restrained myself from fast forwarding to find out. You may call some aspects of the story line predictable, but I found the resolution completely satisfying. I highly recommend this book.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall
- tracey slade
- 04-28-09
Strangely erotic and depressing
The narrator is fabulous, however, this is not a murder mystery - it's a character analysis. Beautifully written but honestly, I was glad when it was over.
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11 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Michele
- 01-09-10
Disappointing
This is the first review I've felt compelled to write although I have listened to many books. Whoever described the narration as "Petulant barking" was exactly on point. The narrator ruins a story that might have had considerably more charm with a better reader. Aren't there editors or someone to say, "hey, hold up there!You sound like you're barking petulantly!!" Well, I fast forwarded to the end,listening to bits and snatches to get the drift and if it had been a book instead of my beloved Ipod I woulda thrown it in the trash. Terrible.
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10 people found this helpful
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Overall
- M. Dunn
- 03-05-10
Mesmerizing
I can't imagiine having enjoyed this book as much if I had read rather than listened to this book. Mark Feuerstein's poetic, sensuous , mesmerizing reading pulled me in, lured me to complete the story, amde me feel the desolation, the isolation, the human need for contact and love in the midst of loneliness. I will carry the message of forgiveness with me long after hearing the last word read.
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9 people found this helpful