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The Book of Collateral Damage
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory.
Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans.
Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood's project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland's past and its present-destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes - in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.
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What listeners say about The Book of Collateral Damage
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
- Amazon Customer
- 04-21-21
one of my favorite authors
beautifully written. Sinan is an incredible writer
better on paper though. the story jumps from location and person often and is hard to follow just listening rather than seeing on paper. maybe it is just me.
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Story
Renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to promote his books, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Historical Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon footage portraying prewar Dutch Jewry and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with his father, his older sister…and an infant he doesn’t recognize.
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Interesting, worth the listen, but not great.
- By Npleaf on 02-11-20
By: Emuna Elon
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Little Gods
- A Novel
- By: Meng Jin
- Narrated by: Karen Huie, Francois Chau, Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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On the night of June 4th, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. Seventeen years later, Su Lan’s daughter, Liya, brings her mother’s ashes to China, along with the silences and contradictions of Su Lan’s life.
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Lots of POVs and story lines
- By OwlLover on 08-06-20
By: Meng Jin
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Sankofa
- A Novel
- By: Chibundu Onuzo
- Narrated by: Sara Powell
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Anna is at a stage of her life when she's beginning to wonder who she really is. She has separated from her husband, her daughter is all grown up, and her mother - the only parent who raised her - is dead. Searching through her mother's belongings one day, Anna finds clues about the African father she never knew. His student diaries chronicle his involvement in radical politics in 1970s London. Anna discovers that he eventually became the president - some would say dictator - of a small nation in West Africa. And he is still alive.
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Not my favorite
- By Diana Swiatkowski on 11-12-21
By: Chibundu Onuzo
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Daughters of Smoke and Fire
- A Novel
- By: Ava Homa
- Narrated by: Vaneh Assadourian
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in Iran, this extraordinary debut novel takes listeners into the everyday lives of the Kurds. Leila dreams of making films to bring the suppressed stories of her people onto the global stage, but obstacles keep piling up. Leila's younger brother Chia, influenced by their father's past torture, imprisonment, and his deep-seated desire for justice, begins to engage with social and political affairs. But his activism grows increasingly risky and one day he disappears in Tehran. Seeking answers about her brother's whereabouts, Leila fears the worst and begins a campaign to save him.
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Excellent!
- By Kevin on 11-05-22
By: Ava Homa
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The Earthquake Bird
- A Novel
- By: Susanna Jones
- Narrated by: Kirsty Rider
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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The grisly headline leaves nothing to the imagination: "Woman's torso recovered from Tokyo Bay. Believed to be missing British bartender Lily Bridges." The only suspect is Lucy Fly. Her friend is dead, her lover has disappeared, and as far as anyone is concerned, she's as good as guilty. Trapped in the interrogation room, Lucy begins to unravel two stories. One, for the police, is a spare outline, offering more questions than answers. The other - the real one, if you believe her - is a gripping dive into an obsessive mind, revealing the checkered past that brought her to Japan.
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Thrilling book with wonderful narration
- By DEVON on 02-09-21
By: Susanna Jones
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Land of Big Numbers
- Stories
- By: Te-Ping Chen
- Narrated by: Eddy Lee, Fiona Rene, Matt Yang King, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled—messily, violently, but still beautifully—into the present. Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited.
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A bit boring to me
- By Fred on 07-25-21
By: Te-Ping Chen
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A Pure Heart
- A Novel
- By: Rajia Hassib
- Narrated by: Ariana Delawari
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Sisters Rose and Gameela Gubran could not have been more different. Rose, an Egyptologist, married an American journalist and immigrated to New York City, where she works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gameela, a devout Muslim since her teenage years, stayed in Cairo. During the aftermath of Egypt's revolution, Gameela is killed in a suicide bombing. When Rose returns to Egypt after the bombing, she sifts through the artifacts Gameela left behind, desperate to understand how her sister came to die, and who she truly was.
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Reader falls short
- By TipTop on 11-19-20
By: Rajia Hassib
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My Father's Paradise
- A Son's Search For His Family's Past
- By: Ariel Sabar
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly 3,000 years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
By: Ariel Sabar
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The Wrong End of the Telescope
- By: Rabih Alameddine
- Narrated by: Lameece Issaq
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of 30 years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children.
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A must read…
- By omid on 07-20-22
By: Rabih Alameddine
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The Ungrateful Refugee
- What Immigrants Never Tell You
- By: Dina Nayeri
- Narrated by: Dina Nayeri
- Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel-turned-refugee camp. Eventually, she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement.
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Amazing story of resilience and compassion
- By PAH on 09-06-19
By: Dina Nayeri
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Correspondents
- A Novel
- By: Tim Murphy
- Narrated by: Necar Zadegan, Assaf Cohen
- Length: 15 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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The world is Rita Khoury’s oyster. The bright and driven daughter of a Boston-area Irish Arab family that has risen over the generations from poor immigrants to part of the coastal elite, Rita grows up in a 1980s cultural mishmash. Corned beef and cabbage sit on the dinner table alongside stuffed grape leaves and tabouleh, all cooked by Rita’s mother, an Irish nurse who met her Lebanese surgeon husband while working at a hospital together. The unconventional yet close-knit family bonds over summers at the beach, wedding line dances, and a shared obsession with the Red Sox.
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The Arab American Dream
- By Iggie on 08-15-19
By: Tim Murphy
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What You Have Heard Is True
- A Memoir of Witness and Resistance
- By: Carolyn Forché
- Narrated by: Carolyn Forché
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
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Beautiful story
- By Norhilda on 05-09-19
By: Carolyn Forché
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
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His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz