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The Garden of Evening Mists
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 15 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's summary
Malaya, 1951. Yun Ling Teoh, the scarred lone survivor of a brutal Japanese wartime camp, seeks solace among the jungle-fringed tea plantations of Cameron Highlands. There she discovers Yugiri, the only Japanese garden in Malaya, and its owner and creator, the enigmatic Aritomo, exiled former gardener of the emperor of Japan.
Despite her hatred of the Japanese, Yun Ling seeks to engage Aritomo to create a garden in memory of her sister, who died in the camp. Aritomo refuses but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice "until the monsoon comes". Then she can design a garden for herself.
As the months pass, Yun Ling finds herself intimately drawn to the gardener and his art, while all around them a communist guerilla war rages. But the Garden of Evening Mists remains a place of mystery. Who is Aritomo and how did he come to leave Japan? And is the real story of how Yun Ling managed to survive the war perhaps the darkest secret of all?
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Brooklyn's Hasidic community of Lubavitchers is turned upside down when family tragedy strikes and everyday life changes forever for Zev Altshul. He is first placed into the care of the closed and close-knit community where he grew up, but soon realizes he can't stay. His saving grace is handball, his gift from God, and the one thing he can rely on as he is shuttled, chased, and abandoned by trusted elders, family, and friends. Even as Zev never fully escapes from the guilt of his choices, he sets course across the United States to discover where loyalty really lies and what it means.
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The orthodox customs and the effect on a young persons thinking and their life choices.
- By kate on 08-30-24
By: Matthew Daub
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Antarctica
- Stories
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Sheena May, Aoife McMahon, Aidan Quinn, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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From the titular story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind—to sleep with another man—Antarctica draws listeners into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off to keep a date nine years in the waiting. Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife. Throughout the collection, Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences.
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Highly recommended even for non short-story reader
- By Kate Juliff on 08-09-22
By: Claire Keegan
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The Space Between Us
- By: Thrity Umrigar
- Narrated by: Purva Bedi
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Thrity Umrigar won the Nieman Fellowship and earned a finalist spot for the PEN/Beyond Margins award with The Space Between Us. Set in modern-day India, this evocative novel follows upper-middle-class Parsi housewife Sera Dubash and 65-year-old illiterate household worker Bhima as they make their way through life. Though separated by their stations in life, the two women share bonds of womanhood that prove far stronger than the divisions of class or culture.
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A Story that stays with you
- By gardener97 on 04-25-15
By: Thrity Umrigar
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Lessons
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: Simon McBurney
- Length: 17 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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When the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has closed, eleven-year-old Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. 2,000 miles from his mother's protective love, stranded at an unusual boarding school, his vulnerability attracts piano teacher Miss Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.
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Narrator Simon McBurney gets my 100% rating
- By Peggy M on 09-26-22
By: Ian McEwan
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The Innocent
- By: Ian McEwan
- Narrated by: John Franklyn-Robbins
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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War-weary Berlin has much to offer Leonard Markham, a young, naive postal engineer: first the arts of sophisticated intrigue, then the delights of sexual pleasure. But Leonard's new knowledge carries a heavy price, dragging him and the listener into a new type of story that is exhaustively suspenseful and utterly irresistible.
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A little gem
- By Geoffrey on 08-19-04
By: Ian McEwan
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The Samurai's Garden
- A Novel
- By: Gail Tsukiyama
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for her unusual story about a 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen who is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.
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A Novel Painted with a Master's Brush
- By Bay Area Califa on 06-25-18
By: Gail Tsukiyama
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The Shadow King
- A Novel
- By: Maaza Mengiste
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 16 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1935, orphaned servant Hirut struggles to adapt to her new household as Ethiopia faces Mussolini's looming invasion. As the battles begin in earnest, Hirut and other women must care for the wounded. But when Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia is about to lose hope, Hirut helps to disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor to keep the fight alive. She becomes his guard, inspiring women to join the war against fascism.
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Not quite what I expected
- By sh1234 on 12-22-19
By: Maaza Mengiste
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A Change of Climate
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Sandra Duncan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
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Beautifully written
- By Patricia S. on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
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Foster
- By: Claire Keegan
- Narrated by: Aoife McMahon
- Length: 1 hr and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
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A story that will stay with me a long time
- By CTKG on 11-01-22
By: Claire Keegan
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The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Jonathan Aris, Paula Wilcox
- Length: 18 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1799, the artificial island of Dejima lies in Nagasaki Harbor as Japan’s outpost for the Dutch East Indies Company. There, Jacob de Zoet has come to make a fortune large enough to return to Holland and marry the woman he loves.
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Good But Uneven
- By Trustme on 07-28-10
By: David Mitchell
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The Possible World
- By: Liese O'Halloran Schwarz
- Narrated by: John Kroft, Tandy Cronyn, Morgan Hallett
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Clare, one of the oldest women in Rhode Island, believes that all the painful secrets of her long life have been laid to rest, until an unexpected encounter with a piece of her past forces her to realize the time has come to tell her story. Ben, a shy, precocious six-year-old being gently raised by a devoted mom, witnesses a terrible crime and is taken to the hospital, bewildered and alone. Lucy, an overworked resident physician in Providence, meets Ben when he's brought into the ER. But between all-night shifts and trying to pick up the pieces of her failing marriage, she doesn't know how to help.
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A beautifully woven story
- By Marcy Day on 06-29-18
What listeners say about The Garden of Evening Mists
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Book fan
- 01-27-24
Extraordinary in every way
Beautiful writing. A revelation of Malaysian culture and history. Insight into Asian differences. Memorable and deeply moving. A treasure.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Onion Eaters
- 05-13-23
Great book. Just don’t listen to it.
The book itself is fantastic. Highly recommended you read it. But skip the Audible version. As long as the narrator is telling the story, it’s fine. But once she tries a character’s voice, speaking in the dialect of a Japanese or Malaysian or any human, it starts grating on your nerves. Like nails on a chalkboard. A bad Mel Blanc impression.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Susan
- 05-02-21
A tale of good and evil in all of us
A beautiful symphonic tale of the art of Japanese gardening and tattooing, coexisting with torture and suffering. Themes of love in different forms, betrayal and redemption.
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- KT
- 06-14-15
This Book is Absolute Perfection
With most books, the author either has you root for the main character (despite their flaws), or has you love the main character because they're so darn cool. It takes incredible skill and enormous courage for an author to force the reader to squirm from discomfort because we may not actually LIKE the main character and we may not find much endearing about her at all. We may not actually be able to forgive some actions of the main character but it doesn't mean we're not with her throughout the story, keeping her at a distance but utterly engrossed.
That kind of writing happens once in a blue moon but Tan Twan Eng has done it. This novel is pure poetry. It forces the reader to question their own morality, to ask themselves "Do I REALLY know what I would do in such a situation? Do I have the right to judge others, having never been in those circumstances?"
Anna Bentinck does a brilliant job. Her accents are fantastic (though admittedly not always accurate) and she portrays the main character with the perfect amount of "chilliness".
Early on in the book, I immediately judged the Professor as some bit player, an insignificant nobody. However, as the book unfolds, the Professor, as a human being, becomes heartbreakingly unforgettable.
This is my favorite book of all time. I'm desperate for Audible to have his other book, Gift of Rain, narrated.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Wave Usa LLC
- 10-11-15
A Work of Art
Any additional comments?
Without question the most beautifully written and narrated book I've had the pleasure to listen to.
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- Johanne Langlois
- 12-21-22
Beautiful story.
Well written. Very descriptive. At times the flag back. Are hard to place in the time line. Narrator could have tried different accents or just read it without an accent. I will read this book again to try and get more details in the correct timeline.
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- eclectic reader
- 09-13-17
A great story exploring coming to terms with life
The story of a woman who has gone from being a prisoner of war during world war ii to being a justice in the Malay supreme court. Through the symbol of a Japanese garden it explores how she comes to tem with some of the disappointments in her life as well as some of her triumphs.
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- Perry Carrison
- 08-09-16
Iron Orchid
What did you love best about The Garden of Evening Mists?
This is an exquisite tale of abuse, self-sufficient survival...and a slow recovery of self. It's set in the exotic (to me) culture of Malaysia during-and-after WWII. An iron-willed Malaysian girl is imprisoned by the marauding Japanese during their invasion of the island at the start of WWII. All is lost during her imprisonment...except her will. She survives but the cost of that survival is significant. Yet, as wounded and defended as she is, she allows life to bring her out of her emotional confinement through her relationship with a Japanese gardener and an Afrikaner champion. The book is unforgettable.
What does Anna Bentinck bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
The reader, Anna Bentinck, embodies the complexity of characters...in all of their complexity...with wit and depth. I loved her performance.
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- MURRAY
- 12-06-16
Poetic
Poetic literature with the heartbreaking history of the narrating character revealed mystically. Enjoyed the narration and the character voice personas.
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- Julie Bandy
- 07-08-13
Wow, best listen I have had in a long time...
Where does The Garden of Evening Mists rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?
One of my all-time favorites.
Have you listened to any of Anna Bentinck’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
No, but I will seek out her work from now on.
Any additional comments?
I never knew I was interested in Japanese gardening until now. This book, with the fabulous narration, was hypnotizing.
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