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Light Perpetual
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Slate, Lit Hub, Fresh Air, and more
A New York Times Notable Book
From the critically acclaimed and award‑winning author of Golden Hill, an “extraordinary … symphonic … casually stunning” (The Wall Street Journal) novel tracing the infinite possibilities of five lives in the bustling neighborhoods of 20th-century London.
Lunchtime on a Saturday, 1944: The Woolworths on Bexford High Street in South London receives a delivery of aluminum saucepans. A crowd gathers to see the first new metal in ages - after all, everything’s been melted down for the war effort. An instant later, the crowd is gone; incinerated. Among the shoppers were five young children.
Who were they? What futures did they lose? This brilliantly constructed novel, inspired by real events, lets an alternative reel of time run, imagining the lives of these five souls as they live through the extraordinary, unimaginable changes of the bustling immensity of 20th-century London. Their intimate everyday dramas, as sons and daughters, spouses, parents, grandparents; as the separated, the remarried, the bereaved. Through decades of social, sexual, and technological transformation, as bus conductors and landlords, as swindlers and teachers, patients and inmates. Days of personal triumphs and disasters; of second chances and redemption.
Ingenious and profound, full of warmth and beauty, Light Perpetual “offers a moving view of how people confront the gap between their expectations and their reality” (The New Yorker) and illuminates the shapes of experience, the extraordinariness of the ordinary, the mysteries of memory, and the preciousness of life.
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What listeners say about Light Perpetual
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- klstickel
- 06-05-21
Outstanding... breathtaking
This is such exemplary, transporting work, as a story and series of stories, and in performance. Of the hundreds of books I’ve read & heard in the past several years, this clearly stands out.
The vast array of voices and moods performed by Imogen Church is unsurpassable - I’ve never heard a better narration.
15 people found this helpful
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- Autodidact
- 08-24-21
deep and beautiful
At the beginning, I had trouble concentrating on the lives described, in their stunning intricacy, as I continued remembering...they died; these lives never happened. Finally, I was able to give in to the ineluctible weave of this master storyteller's tale.
This is a remarkable achievement and a memorable reading experience. Thank you, Frances Spofford.
Brilliant.
11 people found this helpful
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- Adam Shields
- 02-15-22
"Keep reading, the ending makes the novel work"
Summary: In 1944, a German rocket hit a Woolworths in South London, killing many. This novel explores what might have been if five of those children had not been killed.
When encountering fiction, my primary method is to find authors I trust and to read their books without any investigation into the story. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking through a sale at Audible and saw that there was a new novel by Francis Spufford, an author I trust, and I purchased it without reading anything about it.
I started listening, and I was utterly lost and went back and read a little bit about the book to figure out what was going on The opening is a slow-motion description of a V2 rocket blast that killed a large number of people in a crowded Woolworth's department store. Spufford is writing an alternative history where that rocket never launched, or it failed somehow, and the Woolworths was not destroyed. This book follows the lives of five children from about nine years old until about 70. As readers, we check into their story with short vignettes that create an image of what their life is like, but we do not spend enough time with them to get a deep understanding of them.
I have read alternative history fiction before, which doesn't follow the typical model of alternative history, so I think Light Perpetual fails in that area. Generally, alternative history has one of two main models. Either unknown people from one time period go to another time through time travel, and either is shocked at the changes in technology and culture or use their knowledge of the future to make the lives of the past better. This story type is usually considered science fiction, and Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch or Eric Flint's 1632 series are good examples.
The other model of alternative history is to take some famous event or person and imagine a different reality. In this case, the story plays with the reader's knowledge of the natural history and the author's imagination of the alternative history. Stephen Carter's novel The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln imagines that Lincoln survives his assassination attempt in 1865 and two years later faces impeachment. Light Perpetual does not fit either of these two models. We as readers can know something about the history and cultural changes from 1944 until the early 2000s, but that is not alternative history because nothing has changed; it is just a fictional story set in our regular history. The framing of this novel as a type of alternative history, I don't think, really makes a lot of sense. The framing as alternative history distracts from the telling of a good story.
The second thing any potential readers of Francis Spufford need to know is that both of his novels have endings that change the reader's understanding of the whole novel until that point. I don't want to spoil either this or his novel about early NYC, Golden Hill, but I thought Golden Hill was a mediocre novel until the last handful of pages, and then I thought it was brilliant. So when I was about to give up on this novel, roughly 1/3 of the way through, I pressed on because I hoped for a similar resolution. And I was not disappointed, although what I got was not what I expected. Part of the problem of the early parts of Light Perpetual did not give me enough of the characters to be invested in their stories until I was about 2/3 of the way through the novel. I needed to feel like there would be resolution or redemption or people worth caring about. The novel got there, but it took a while.
A third thing that readers of Light Perpetual probably want to know is that Francis Spufford has written one of the few books of apologetics that I think is worth reading. I am not a fan of Christian apologetics as it is commonly conceived. Yes, Christians sometimes need help working through issues of faith and reason. But I do not think that most non-Christians are persuaded about the rationality or usefulness of Christianity by philosophical or other types of arguments. Christianity is about a relationship with Christ, not about argumentation and methodology. Francis Spufford's Unapologetic isn't trying to argue anyone into belief; he simply tells others that despite occasional issues of doubt and disbelief, he finds Christianity emotionally satisfying and that it "makes sense" of his experience. Once I was finished with Light Perpetual, I think Spufford was channeling that non-fiction defense of Christianity into a fictional story that could explore life's meaning.
Light Perpetual is not a book of Christian fiction that could be published in the US. First, there is too much sex, drugs, language, and ambiguity. There is a lot of good Christian fiction that has been published in the US, but commonly Christian fiction deserves a lot of its scorn for being trite and overly neat. (If you haven't read Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith by Daniel Stillman, I recommend it.) My favorite Christian fiction is works by British authors like Susan Howatch or Spufford, or books that deal with faith but are published by secular publishers like Marilynne Robinson or Madeline L'Engle. Some Christian publishers have published excellent fiction like the Back to Murder series, but they are rare and often do not sell well.
Spufford is telling a moral story, although not one that is wrapped up with a bow, and where everyone gets there just rewards. Yes, some gain wisdom with age and glimpse the meaning of life. But there is also hardship at the end of life. Parents cannot solve every problem of their children or grandchildren. Sometimes kindness is repaid with cruelty. Some people gain years, but not wisdom.
I listened to Light Perpetual as an audiobook. This is a book that I look forward to picking up a print copy and slowly working my way through again to see what I may have missed on my first reading. I suspect there is more there than what I got the first time and that a second reading with be worth the effort.
10 people found this helpful
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- Ben Utter
- 06-18-21
Transcendently written and brilliantly performed.
This is one of those novels that manages to contain the world. Come for the sumptuous sentences; stay for the beautiful exploration of redemption.
6 people found this helpful
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- M F.
- 08-23-21
Superlatives only
I can’t say enough good things about this miraculous book. It is a masterpiece. The narrator of this recording is probably the best I’ve ever heard, too. Thank you for a transcendent experience.
4 people found this helpful
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- Luna
- 04-08-22
Narrator Makes Listening Impossible
I tried very hard to listen to this book, but found the narrator beyond annoying, constant overwrought drama for the most trivial sentence. I tried moving the speed to 1.1,, which helped a little but not much. I cannot comment on the story; couldn't tolerate more than an hour. I really don't understand all the praise the narrator has received in these reviews, which is the only reason I am writing this.
3 people found this helpful
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- gail
- 08-22-21
Wonderful reader
The reader is wonderful. She breathed a spirit into the book that I think would have been missing from the printed word. On the other hand, it might have been easier to keep track on the characters and the jumps in time in a print edition.
3 people found this helpful
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- Daniel Chaikin
- 10-26-21
slow, but thoughtful and well read
Imogen Church is terrific and manages an interesting but dry-ish text very well. Recommended for anyone interested. (I chose this as I'm working through the Booker longllist, mostly on audio.)
2 people found this helpful
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- MJSea
- 05-13-22
Really tried, but…
I really tried to get into this but gave up. I found the writing to be so wordy and rambling, I totally lost what was being conveyed. Narrator did a very good job but I found the book to be irritating and obtuse.
1 person found this helpful
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- starstuff
- 02-14-22
Mostly boring
I tried to read his book once before (in physical form), but couldn’t get past the first 85 pages… I just found it mostly boring and I didn’t like the writing style. I thought I’d try the audio, as I love Imogen Church’s readings. But I still can’t get behind this story, I still find it mostly boring, the characters are insipid, and despite the fact that I usually love this narrator, I don’t like her inflection or the different voices.
1 person found this helpful
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Story
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
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Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
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Light Perpetual
- By: Andrzej Sapkowski, David French - Translator
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After his adventures in The Tower of Fools and Warriors of God, Reynevan is on the run again, harried by enemies—some human, and some mystical—at every turn. These are cruel and dangerous times for a man such as Reynevan, and to survive, he must set aside his history as a peaceful healer and idealist and play the brutal role of Hussite spy as crusades sweep through Silesia and the Czech Republic, and the world around him is forever changed.
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The end of an epic
- By Scentart on 01-10-23
By: Andrzej Sapkowski, and others
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Unapologetic
- Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Francis Spufford
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience.
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Superb! So helpful.
- By debra a thompson on 05-27-22
By: Francis Spufford
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The Foreign Student
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Daniel K. Isaac
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
Highly acclaimed by critics, The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together....
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A beautiful story
- By Doglver on 10-30-20
By: Susan Choi
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Emerald City
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston, Madeleine Lambert, Richard Waterhouse
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
-
Story
These 11 masterful stories - the first collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters - models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls - are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations.
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Awful narrator
- By carrieann on 10-12-19
By: Jennifer Egan
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Golden Hill
- A Novel of Old New York
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Sarah Borges
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The spectacular first novel from acclaimed nonfiction author Francis Spufford follows the adventures of a mysterious young man in mid-18th century Manhattan, 30 years before the American Revolution.
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So Much Potential But A Failure Of Execution
- By Sara on 12-01-17
By: Francis Spufford
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Red Plenty
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, and as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant.
-
-
Simple review
- By Jay J Peters on 06-24-18
By: Francis Spufford
-
Light Perpetual
- By: Andrzej Sapkowski, David French - Translator
- Narrated by: Peter Kenny
- Length: 19 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After his adventures in The Tower of Fools and Warriors of God, Reynevan is on the run again, harried by enemies—some human, and some mystical—at every turn. These are cruel and dangerous times for a man such as Reynevan, and to survive, he must set aside his history as a peaceful healer and idealist and play the brutal role of Hussite spy as crusades sweep through Silesia and the Czech Republic, and the world around him is forever changed.
-
-
The end of an epic
- By Scentart on 01-10-23
By: Andrzej Sapkowski, and others
-
Unapologetic
- Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense
- By: Francis Spufford
- Narrated by: Francis Spufford
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience.
-
-
Superb! So helpful.
- By debra a thompson on 05-27-22
By: Francis Spufford
-
The Foreign Student
- A Novel
- By: Susan Choi
- Narrated by: Daniel K. Isaac
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Highly acclaimed by critics, The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together....
-
-
A beautiful story
- By Doglver on 10-30-20
By: Susan Choi
-
Emerald City
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston, Madeleine Lambert, Richard Waterhouse
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
These 11 masterful stories - the first collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan - deal with loneliness and longing, regret and desire. Egan’s characters - models and housewives, bankers and schoolgirls - are united by their search for something outside their own realm of experience. They set out from locations as exotic as China and Bora Bora, as cosmopolitan as downtown Manhattan, or as familiar as suburban Illinois to seek their own transformations.
-
-
Awful narrator
- By carrieann on 10-12-19
By: Jennifer Egan
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A Town Called Solace
- By: Mary Lawson
- Narrated by: Maggie Huculak, Tajja Isen, Ian Lake
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
A Town Called Solace, the brilliant and emotionally radiant new novel from Mary Lawson, her first in nearly a decade, opens on a family in crisis. Sixteen-year-old Rose is missing. Angry and rebellious, she had a row with her mother, stormed out of the house and simply disappeared. Left behind is seven-year-old Clara, Rose’s adoring little sister. Isolated by her parents’ efforts to protect her from the truth, Clara is bewildered and distraught.
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beautiful story
- By Barbara S on 07-06-21
By: Mary Lawson
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Paradais
- By: Fernanda Melchor
- Narrated by: Fabiola Stevenson
- Length: 3 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor - an attractive married woman and mother - while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.
By: Fernanda Melchor
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Assembly
- By: Natasha Brown
- Narrated by: Pippa Bennett-Warner
- Length: 1 hr and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The narrator of Assembly is a Black British woman. She is preparing to attend a lavish garden party at her boyfriend’s family estate, set deep in the English countryside. At the same time, she is considering the carefully assembled pieces of herself. As the minutes tick down and the future beckons, she can’t escape the question: Is it time to take it all apart?
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HATED IT
- By valerie on 09-24-21
By: Natasha Brown
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A Calling for Charlie Barnes
- By: Joshua Ferris
- Narrated by: Nick Offerman
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises, and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.
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the best book I've read this year
- By Brent & Marie on 10-07-21
By: Joshua Ferris
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Afterparties
- Stories
- By: Anthony Veasna So
- Narrated by: Jason Sean
- Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.
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Brave and Bold
- By darren w kong on 04-08-22
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The Magician
- A Novel
- By: Colm Toibin
- Narrated by: Gunnar Cauthery
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Magician opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the 20th century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice.
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Terrific listening experience
- By M. Mead on 09-17-21
By: Colm Toibin