Firstborn
A Memoir
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Firstborn
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Narrated by:
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Lauren Christensen
About this listen
“An achingly beautiful testament to fierce loss, fierce love and fierce resilience.”—People Magazine
“You will find yourself rationing out pages to spend more time in the glow of Christensen’s luminous prose and inextinguishable love. A triumph.”—Oprah Daily (best new books to read this spring)
A lapidary memoir of losing a child before she can be born, which the author began writing the day she came home from the hospital—an intimate story about our most searing losses and brightest hopes
“Some days I still think this is all just a sad story I’ll tell Simone one day.”
Lauren Christensen is a thirtysomething editor in New York City when she meets her future husband, Gabe, a writer with whom she falls in love right away. Her beloved grandfather is dying, but the young couple is bringing new life into the family: Lauren and Gabe joyfully discover she is pregnant with their daughter, Simone.
As Lauren faces the prospect of becoming a parent, she learns to let go of the fear of abandonment and need for control instilled in her by growing up with a largely absent father and a high-powered mother who was often away on business. Lauren and Gabe are incandescently happy in their exuberant, messy, beautiful shared world. But just weeks after their wedding, they learn that their worst nightmare has come true: Simone is dying in the womb.
In fierce, tender, spellbinding prose, Firstborn brings us to the very heart of the human paradox: How do we live when everyone who makes up our world will someday be gone? And how can we mourn when the cosmic order has been turned upside down—when a child dies before she is born?
As she comes up against the brutal limits of maternal healthcare and the limitlessness of her love for her daughter, Lauren Christensen finds a key, generous and brave, in which to share her loss, a testimony whose diamond-like brilliance refracts a universal light.
©2025 Lauren Christensen (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“There are two fierce, fragile fighters in Firstborn, Lauren Christensen’s touching memoir about the life and death of her tiny daughter, Simone, who was stillborn 22 weeks into Christensen’s pregnancy. The great accomplishment of this book is that I feel I have gotten to know and care for both tenacious people . . . Told with dry, offhand charm . . . there is just love, and the care a mother gives her daughter, no matter what; and finally and always the love this mother, Lauren Christensen, gave her daughter, Simone, in this life and beyond.”—Amy Bloom, The New York Times Book Review
“Masterfully constructed . . . Powerful and beautifully written, Firstborn tells the archetypal story of a journey to the underworld, from which the storyteller emerges to deliver wisdom both profound and painful. How does one go on living after such a calamity? Christensen’s sparkling telling is the ultimate proof of survival: an artful, authentic story forged from the messiness of real life. . . . Told in the fierce, clear voice of someone who has been through death . . . full of love . . . exquisitely sensitive . . . Firstborn is a treasure for readers, as we navigate difficult passages of our own, whatever their nature.”—Kathryn Rhett, The Washington Post
“Some books win our allegiance almost instantly. Such was the case with Lauren Christensen’s radiant, rigorous, heart-rending debut memoir, Firstborn, which engaged me from the opening pages, profoundly moved me, and gave me thoughts too deep for tears . . . She depicts a world of pain and troubles, yet the memoir is suffused with such unwavering love, and characterized by such soulful intelligence and courageous candor, that it feels uplifting in a profoundly well-earned way . . . Like the great romantic poet [Wordsworth], Christensen has both recorded her own loss in its particularity and made it representative of all loss.”—Priscilla Gilman, The Boston Globe
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Story2.5 out of 5 stars 12
Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.
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1 out of 5 stars
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It was soooo bad. I had to quit midway thru.
- By malibooboo on 04-22-25
By: Marcy Dermansky
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Rooms for Vanishing
- A Novel
- By: Stuart Nadler
- Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy, Bruce Mann, Kathleen Gati, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
By: Stuart Nadler
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
- A Novel
- By: Colwill Brown
- Narrated by: Colwill Brown
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall1 out of 5 stars 1
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are.
By: Colwill Brown
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Firstborn Girls
- A Memoir
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, Bernice L. McFadden
- Length: 12 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 25
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 25
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Story5 out of 5 stars 25
On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”
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4 out of 5 stars
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Great Read
- By Mia CB on 05-15-25
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Passing Through a Prairie Country
- A Novel
- By: Dennis E. Staples
- Narrated by: Charlotte Flyte
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
For decades, a dark force has terrorized the Languille Lake reservation. Only spoken of in whispers as "the sandman," he lurks in the Hidden Atlantis Lake Resort and Casino, the reservation's main attraction and source of revenue, leeching its patrons' dreams and ambitions and also preventing the ghosts that linger there from moving on. Fleeing a breakup, Marion Lafournier, a mid-twenties Ojibwe, seeks solace in the slot machine's siren song.
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom
- Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China
- By: Emily Feng
- Narrated by: Emily Feng
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 17
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 16
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 16
The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Genuine experiences yield clear insights to life in China and for the Chinese diaspora.
- By Brian Thorson on 06-19-25
By: Emily Feng
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Mothers and Other Fictional Characters
- A Memoir in Essays
- By: Nicole Graev Lipson
- Narrated by: Nicole Graev Lipson
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 2
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 2
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Story5 out of 5 stars 2
What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Sublime
- By Shawna M. Miller on 03-23-25
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The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto
- A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
- By: Benjamin Wallace
- Narrated by: Benjamin Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 8
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Story4 out of 5 stars 8
In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Interesting read, even for a non-geek
- By A reader on 04-23-25
By: Benjamin Wallace
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Animal Instinct
- By: Amy Shearn
- Narrated by: Allyson Ryan
- Length: 9 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3 out of 5 stars 4
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Performance3 out of 5 stars 4
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Story3 out of 5 stars 4
It’s spring of 2020 and Rachel Bloomstein—mother of three, recent divorcée, and Brooklynite—is stuck inside. But her newly awakened sexual desire and lust for a new life refuse to be contained. Leaning on her best friend Lulu to show her the ropes, Rachel dips a toe in the online dating world, leading to park dates with younger men, flirtations with beautiful women, and actual, in-person sex. None of them, individually, are perfect . . . hence her rotation. But what if one person could perfectly cater to all her emotional needs?
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1 out of 5 stars
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Horrible!
- By Gregory W. Bell on 06-06-25
By: Amy Shearn
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The Paris Express
- By: Emma Donoghue
- Narrated by: Justin Avoth
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 39
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Story4 out of 5 stars 39
Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding narrator
- By Amazon Customer on 03-19-25
By: Emma Donoghue
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Unshrunk
- A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance
- By: Laura Delano
- Narrated by: Laura Delano
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 33
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 33
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Story5 out of 5 stars 33
At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and an antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An Incredible Story of a Young Woman Finding her Way Back to Life.
- By Andrea Teale on 06-17-25
By: Laura Delano
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Everywhere You Don't Belong
- By: Gabriel Bump
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 177
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 155
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Story4 out of 5 stars 155
In this powerful, edgy, and funny debut novel about making right and wrong choices, Bump gives us an unforgettable and lovable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude is a young black man in search of a place where he can fit; born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights-era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change. After a riot consumes his neighborhood, Claude decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new life and identity. But he discovers, there's no escaping the people and places that made him.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Great coming of age story...
- By Roslynde on 11-25-20
By: Gabriel Bump
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The Echoes
- A Novel
- By: Evie Wyld
- Narrated by: Sebastian Humphreys, Vivien Carter
- Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 13
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 13
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 13
Max didn’t believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he is still here, he watches his girlfriend, Hannah, lost in grief in the apartment they shared and begins to realize how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max’s death, Hannah was haunted by the secrets she left Australia to escape. A relationship with Max seemed to offer the potential of a fresh new chapter, but the past refused to stay hidden.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Nothing to keep me interested.
- By Cari Brotherton on 03-07-25
By: Evie Wyld
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Memorial Days
- A Memoir
- By: Geraldine Brooks
- Narrated by: Geraldine Brooks
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 206
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 195
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 195
Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz–just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy–collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Uninspired, mediocre writing.
- By C. Tyler on 03-04-25
By: Geraldine Brooks
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Hunchback
- A Novel
- By: Saou Ichikawa
- Narrated by: Polly Barton, Yuriri Naka
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 13
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 13
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 13
Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Blooming from the Mud
- By The Rasher on 04-01-25
By: Saou Ichikawa
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Spellbound
- My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith
- By: Phil Hanley
- Narrated by: Phil Hanley
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 83
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Story5 out of 5 stars 83
When Phil Hanley was in first grade, he realized something that would forever set him apart from his peers: he couldn’t read. His teachers were ill-equipped to assist him, and he slipped through the school’s cracks, year by year falling further and further behind his friends. Finally, he was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that would shape the rest of his life. Unable to pursue college or a traditional job, Phil was thrust into a life defined by unconventional twists. Eventually, he found himself on a stage with a microphone, a spotlight, and five minutes of jokes.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I love Phil Hanley’s comedy and I hope someone reads this to him!
- By J. Brown on 03-20-25
By: Phil Hanley
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O Sinners!
- A Novel
- By: Nicole Cuffy
- Narrated by: JD Jackson, SEVAN
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 5
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story4 out of 5 stars 5
Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist processing the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed himself in a cult called “the nameless.” Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, the nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “all suffering is distortion” and “see only beauty.”
By: Nicole Cuffy
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Goddess Complex
- A Novel
- By: Sanjena Sathian
- Narrated by: Rukhmani K. Desai
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 8
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Story4 out of 5 stars 8
Sanjana Satyananda is trying to recover her life. It’s been a year since she walked out on her husband, a struggling actor named Killian, at a commune in India, after a disagreement about whether to have children. Now, Sanjana is struggling to resurrect her busted anthropology dissertation and crashing at her annoyingly perfect sister’s while her well-adjusted peers obsess over marriages, mortgages, and motherhood. Sanjana needs to move forward—and finalize her divorce, ASAP.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Internal and External conflict of being able to bare children
- By Amazon Customer on 06-04-25
By: Sanjena Sathian
Beautiful
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My Anna
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