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True History of the Kelly Gang
- Narrated by: Gianfranco Negroponte
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
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Publisher's summary
Man Booker Prize, Fiction, 2001
Ned Kelly's name resonates in Australia the same way the name Jesse James does in America. Was he a crusading folk hero or murderous horse thief and bank robber? Who was the real Ned Kelly? As the impoverished son of an Irish convict, Kelly was cheated, lied to, and abused by the English. Committed to fighting back against oppression, Kelly and his gang of outlaws eluded police for nearly two years. Brilliantly novelized by Peter Carey, the story of the Kelly Gang unfolds from a series of 13 compassionate letters written, while on the run, by Kelly to his infant daughter. Building from this historical legend and testing our sympathies, Carey crafts a deeply humanistic piece of historical fiction, a tale of injustice and violence.
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- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.
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Pearl in a Cage
- By Verita on 06-16-17
By: Joy Dettman
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Collected Stories of William Faulkner
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer, Susan Denaker, Scott Brick, and others
- Length: 31 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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This magisterial collection of short works by Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner reminds listeners of his ability to compress his epic vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets. Among the 42 selections in this audiobook are such classics as "A Bear Hunt", "A Rose for Emily", "Two Soldiers", and "The Brooch".
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Audiobook Table of Contents (by Chapter)
- By Anonymous User on 09-27-20
By: William Faulkner
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The Plague of Doves
- By: Louise Erdrich
- Narrated by: Peter Francis James, Kathleen McInerney
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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The unsolved murder of a farm family haunts the small, white, off-reservation town of Pluto, North Dakota. The vengeance exacted for this crime and the subsequent distortions of truth transform the lives of Ojibwe living on the nearby reservation and shape the passions of both communities for the next generation.
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Avoid this Plague
- By Andre on 05-16-08
By: Louise Erdrich
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Jack Maggs
- By: Peter Carey
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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With scars on his back and silver in his pocket, the huge figure of Jack Maggs strides across the rich landscape of 19th century London. As this enigmatic man moves through its streets and houses, his single-minded quest to find his son will engender love, deceit, and vengeance in the lives around him.
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Jack Maggs
- By Kathleen on 04-04-05
By: Peter Carey
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Hell at the Breech
- By: Tom Franklin
- Narrated by: Larry Pine
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1897, an aspiring politician is mysteriously murdered in the rural area of Alabama known as Mitcham Beat. His outraged friends - mostly poor cotton farmers - form a secret society, Hell-at-the-Breech, to punish the townspeople they believe responsible. The hooded members wage a bloody year-long campaign of terror that culminates in a massacre where the innocent suffer alongside the guilty.
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Pull up them breeches, son
- By W Perry Hall on 02-04-14
By: Tom Franklin
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Far North
- A Novel
- By: Marcel Theroux
- Narrated by: Yelena Schmulenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.
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Spellbinding!
- By Joan on 01-14-10
By: Marcel Theroux
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Drums Along the Mohawk
- By: Walter D. Edmonds
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 21 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Drums along the Mohawk, Walter D. Edmonds' masterpiece, is not only the best historical novel about upstate New York since James Fenimore Cooper, it was also number one on the bestseller list for two years, only yielding to the epic Gone with the Wind. This is the story of the forgotten pioneers of the Mohawk Valley during the Revolutionary War. Here Gilbert Martin and his young wife struggled and lived and hoped.
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Wonderful
- By Robert on 09-06-15
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National Velvet
- By: Enid Bagnold
- Narrated by: Annette Chown
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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National Velvet is a classic tale of dreams, ambition and one girl's belief in a horse. Velvet is mad about horses. When she wins a piebald horse in a raffle, she knows he's something special. His heart is as big as the five-foot fences he jumps, and he'll do anything for Velvet. Soon she and her friend, Mi, have their sights set on the biggest race in England. But can a girl win the Grand National?
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Just wonderful
- By Shiloah Baker on 11-18-16
By: Enid Bagnold
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The Fixer
- A Novel
- By: Bernard Malamud
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev and, after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder.
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Technical Problems Need To Ne Resolved
- By REX LANYI on 12-24-20
By: Bernard Malamud
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The Color of Lightning
- By: Paulette Jiles
- Narrated by: Jack Garrett
- Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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A soaring work of the imagination based on oral histories of the post - Civil War years in North Texas, Paulette Jiles's The Color of Lightning is at once an intimate look into the hearts and hopes of tragically flawed human beings and a courageous reexamination of a dark American history.
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Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.
- By Merrilee R on 02-20-17
By: Paulette Jiles
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The Hamlet
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 14 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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The Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation.
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The Long, Hot Summer
- By W Perry Hall on 07-30-17
By: William Faulkner
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OVERWHELMINGLY FINE
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Overly ambitious
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With scars on his back and silver in his pocket, the huge figure of Jack Maggs strides across the rich landscape of 19th century London. As this enigmatic man moves through its streets and houses, his single-minded quest to find his son will engender love, deceit, and vengeance in the lives around him.
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Jack Maggs
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A book to wade in, submerge into.
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With scars on his back and silver in his pocket, the huge figure of Jack Maggs strides across the rich landscape of 19th century London. As this enigmatic man moves through its streets and houses, his single-minded quest to find his son will engender love, deceit, and vengeance in the lives around him.
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Jack Maggs
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This is the story of an artist as an aging man, struggling through the wreckage of Japan's World War II experience. Ishiguro's first novel.
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An incongruous reader
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Beautiful, insightful, troubling
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Absolutely delightful read
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As a pair of young scholars research the lives of two Victorian poets, they uncover their letters, journals, and poems and track their movements from London to Yorkshire - from spiritualist seances to the fairy-haunted far west of Brittany. What emerges is an extraordinary counterpoint of passion and ideas.
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Absolutely Excellent
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The Blind Assassin
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
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Powerful yet heartbreaking. An absolute must for every Australian
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Too many supernatural elements for my taste
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Critics have used every possible superlative to praise the works of two-time Man Booker Prize winner Peter Carey. In The Chemistry of Tears, Carey continues to astound with a story of love, death, and human invention. Museum curator Catherine’s affair comes to an abrupt end with her married lover’s untimely death. Denied outward grief by the nature of their relationship, Catherine retreats into isolation. Delving into notebooks more than a century old, she feels a growing connection to Henry Brandling, who in 1854 gave life to a mechanical creature.
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Not worth reading…
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Winner, The Man Booker Prize, 2015 Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters - assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts - A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s.
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A Tough Read
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Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour, and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.
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Disappointing
- By Andrew Lim on 06-14-21
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Red Harvest
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When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. From the author of The Maltese Falcon.
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Great story, great narration, terrible reccording
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By: Dashiell Hammett
What listeners say about True History of the Kelly Gang
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Lee Chemel
- 11-18-15
beautiful writing, great story
Peter Carey read a letter that was written by the real 19th century outlaw, Ned Kelly (known as the Jesse James of Australia) and then fashioned an imagined biography from that voice and that time. It is a wonderful story, a wonderful piece of writing.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Merlin
- 01-02-15
Interesting narrative
Interesting,and well told, but not as sensationally good as I was expecting from Peter Carey
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1 person found this helpful
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- David L. Petry
- 10-26-13
Adjectively excellent
This is not like any outlaw story I've ever read. It is told from Ned's own lips and a short way in you've forgotten there's a narrator or an author. These are Ned Kelly's own writings, damn it, and told in his own voice.
The story is engaging, taut and utterly authentic. It is peopled with a humanity that oozes with veracity. The good and the bad are hardly imagined in this tale. There is the living and the loves, the family, the life under someone's thumb. And through it all, I felt like I was there and found myself sneering once or twice, 'adjectively.'
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Overall
- Margaret
- 02-11-08
Brilliant and Poetic
The True History of the Kelly Gang is, hands down, the best recorded book I have ever heard. Peter Carey is truly a gifted writer whose ear for 19th Century Australian Irish "selector" dialogue is amazing. The reader, Giancarlo Negroponte, is a masterful and talented voice actor. I knew nothing about Ned Kelly before listening to this book and have been inspired to learn more about Australia's national hero. I did not want this book to end and can still hear Ned Kelly's voice in my head. Carey's literary, fictionalized version of the Kelly Gang's story achieves something truly remarkable. It conveys, in the way that only exceptional poetry and prose can, the essence of how the heritage of transportation formed the unique Australian identity and of how Ned Kelly in particular embodied the belief that something good could come of convicts.
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12 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Denis
- 08-16-07
Great book, Great narrator
The book is lively, amusing and interesting. The narrator is the best I've heard. His reading captures the book's diverse characters in a clear and distinctive manner without seeming actorish.
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7 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Moire
- 01-17-05
A Sad Story Told Well
I got this because I wanted to learn more about the Autstrailian anti-hero, Ned Kelly. The story is sadder than I thought it would be. Ned Kelly and his family certainly have more than their share of bad luck; but I got tired of the Kellys believing that they were always the victims of circumstance and corruption. This story makes it clear that the Kellys and their families were mostly criminals, which is why they were harassed by the police.
The story also makes it clear that there is NOTHING glamorous about being an outlaw.
I really liked the Austrailian narration, but didn't understand a lot of the slang (maybe there is a glossary in the dead tree edition). And it would have been a bit less distracting if the narrator had either used the cuss words, or dropped them, but the "adjectival" frequently interferred with the flow of the narration.
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7 people found this helpful
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- E. Tillema
- 09-16-11
Thoroughly Enjoyed the Book
I surprised myself by really getting into this book. Interesting and well done. Kudos.
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- Joe Kraus
- 04-03-19
An Almost-Lost Voice Recovered
I expected I would love this one – I mean, it’s a Booker Prize winner and it deals with a gang of Australian outlaws – so it’s mildly disappointing to say I merely liked it very much.
On the one hand, I admire what Carey is doing with this novel. He’s taking what we know of the historical Ned Kelly and wrapping a story around it. We get an individual whose frustrations and passions lead him to quasi-insurrection, and we get a sense of the larger social and ethnic tensions roiling late 19th Century Australia. After all, this is an Aussie-Irish under-class dealing with the same global oppression as the victims of the Famine and the Thomas Nast-caricaturing of the United States.
And, above all, Carey finds a remarkable voice in which to tell the story. I looked up a bit of the original writings of Kelly, and it’s amazing to hear him on the page. In an interview appended to the novel, Carey talks of discovering Kelly’s voice and imagining the outlaw as a kind of proto-Joyce or proto-Beckett, someone tearing familiar language into strips and then weaving them back into a fresh whole.
So, yes, I did love all that, and I can mostly see how this won the Booker.
At the same time, though, I suspect much of the power of this novel turns on an awareness of how Carey is manipulating the known fragments of Kelly’s history into a whole. I’ve done a little digging, but I can’t “know” Kelly in the way of an Australian who sees him as perhaps the country’s most famous individual. That is, Kelly represents something in Australian culture, something crucial as a point of contrast with what Carey is doing with him, but that doesn’t come through within the novel. It takes a familiarity with the Australian experience.
I am certain this happens in reverse all the time. There must be elements of Gatsby that don’t translate because the touchstones are so tied into distinctly U.S. culture – don’t get me started, but I remain convinced that only a handful of Gatsby readers recognize the cultural significance of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim against the backdrop of the East and West Egg socialites we meet.
As a bottom line, then, part of the very success of Carey’s novel diminishes my pleasure in it. His story is so compelling, it seems so whole, that it’s easy to lose sight of the full way in which he has woven the different known chapters into his larger imagined history. In his interview, he even says as much; he was disappointed with some of the early, positive reviews that didn’t seem to realize the depth of his authorial project. It took later reviewers to point out the extent to which he’d added depth to the source material, to note how dramatically he was consciously reshaping a foundational myth of Aussie culture.
Even as I recognize the scope of that ambition, I find I’m like the first-wave of those reviewers. I enjoy the story and characterizations here – though I’m mildly frustrated that Carey condenses the best-known incidents (because his Aussie readership would already know them) into newspaper-style re-retellings – but I am aware that perhaps the highest ambition of the work falls outside what I can see of it.
I’m loosely working my way through significant contemporary Australian literature, with my current favorite being Richard Flanagan. I’d heard Carey was the current heavyweight champ in that field. Good as this is, I have to score this round for my man Flanagan.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Bocaboy
- 08-17-09
Maybe you have to be Australian?
I found this reading very hard to follow. The narrator uses an authentic Australian accent, so unless I was concentrating very hard, I often had trouble understanding what just happened in the story. The primary plot line is easy to follow, but the subtleties and nuance of a book should be what distinguish it, and those were hard to discern in this audio book.
In reading other listeners reviews, clearly many people loved it. Maybe the accent didn't bother them. I know that in Simon Vance's reading of Oliver Twist, the accent worked towards enhancing the book. Here, I found the dialect distracting.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- thawstone
- 12-26-09
More Amazing Than Fiction
Although the author did a fantastic job of fictionalizing the story surrounding the true story of Ned Kelly, it's true aspects of the story that are most amazing. The fact that every step of Ned's life were guided by despiration makes for real page turner. The Aussie accents take a bit getting used to, but I learned a lot of colorful phrases and a lot about Aussie history and culture.
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2 people found this helpful