-
The Great Offshore Grounds
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Categories: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Audible Premium Plus
$14.95 a month
Buy for $31.50
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
- A Novel
- By: Christopher Beha
- Narrated by: Jim Frangione
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for The Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A sports statistician, data journalist, and newly minted media celebrity who correctly forecasted every outcome of the 2008 election, Sam’s familiar with predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, things turn complicated. Sam’s editor sends him to profile disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle.
-
-
Not a compelling story
- By Meddlesome on 07-26-20
By: Christopher Beha
-
A Children's Bible
- By: Lydia Millet
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders - including Eve, who narrates the story - decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.
-
-
What a stupid book!
- By Paganini on 05-15-20
By: Lydia Millet
-
The New Wilderness
- By: Diane Cook
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and 18 others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it.
-
-
meh
- By soup cook on 10-29-20
By: Diane Cook
-
Homeland Elegies
- A Novel
- By: Ayad Akhtar
- Narrated by: Ayad Akhtar
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one - least of all himself - in the process.
-
-
Sings
- By W Perry Hall on 10-21-20
By: Ayad Akhtar
-
The Cold Millions
- A Novel
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Marin Ireland, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Dolan brothers live by their wits, jumping freight trains, and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar, and who introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: A wealthy mining magnate who will stop at nothing to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.
-
-
Good Story ....Hard to follow on Audio
- By zman on 11-13-20
By: Jess Walter
-
Interior Chinatown
- A Novel
- By: Charles Yu
- Narrated by: Joel de la Fuente
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told.
-
-
Kong Fu Guy
- By JCY on 01-30-20
By: Charles Yu
-
The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
- A Novel
- By: Christopher Beha
- Narrated by: Jim Frangione
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for The Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A sports statistician, data journalist, and newly minted media celebrity who correctly forecasted every outcome of the 2008 election, Sam’s familiar with predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, things turn complicated. Sam’s editor sends him to profile disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle.
-
-
Not a compelling story
- By Meddlesome on 07-26-20
By: Christopher Beha
-
A Children's Bible
- By: Lydia Millet
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 5 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Contemptuous of their parents, who pass their days in a stupor of liquor, drugs, and sex, the children feel neglected and suffocated at the same time. When a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, the group's ringleaders - including Eve, who narrates the story - decide to run away, leading the younger ones on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside.
-
-
What a stupid book!
- By Paganini on 05-15-20
By: Lydia Millet
-
The New Wilderness
- By: Diane Cook
- Narrated by: Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 12 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and 18 others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it.
-
-
meh
- By soup cook on 10-29-20
By: Diane Cook
-
Homeland Elegies
- A Novel
- By: Ayad Akhtar
- Narrated by: Ayad Akhtar
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one - least of all himself - in the process.
-
-
Sings
- By W Perry Hall on 10-21-20
By: Ayad Akhtar
-
The Cold Millions
- A Novel
- By: Jess Walter
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Gary Farmer, Marin Ireland, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Dolan brothers live by their wits, jumping freight trains, and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While 16-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar, and who introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: A wealthy mining magnate who will stop at nothing to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.
-
-
Good Story ....Hard to follow on Audio
- By zman on 11-13-20
By: Jess Walter
-
Interior Chinatown
- A Novel
- By: Charles Yu
- Narrated by: Joel de la Fuente
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy - the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told.
-
-
Kong Fu Guy
- By JCY on 01-30-20
By: Charles Yu
-
Shuggie Bain
- By: Douglas Stuart
- Narrated by: Angus King
- Length: 17 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: She is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good - her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor.
-
-
Rather Interesting, Very Unfortunate
- By Sharey on 02-29-20
By: Douglas Stuart
-
To Be a Man
- Stories
- By: Nicole Krauss
- Narrated by: Nicole Krauss
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In one of her strongest works of fiction yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fearlessly into the struggle to understand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the arising tensions that have existed from the very beginning of time. Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in To Be a Man feature male characters as fathers, lovers, friends, children, seducers, and even a lost husband who may never have been a husband at all.
-
-
luscious short stories
- By M Faunt on 01-12-21
By: Nicole Krauss
-
Leave the World Behind
- A Novel
- By: Rumaan Alam
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: A quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple - it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area - with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service - it’s hard to know what to believe.
-
-
I knew people wouldn’t like it
- By BookLover on 10-15-20
By: Rumaan Alam
-
A Burning
- A Novel
- By: Megha Majumdar
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam, Priya Ayyar, Deepti Gupta, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely — an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor — has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.
-
-
Heartbreaking and Brilliantly Performed
- By Steve M on 07-28-20
By: Megha Majumdar
-
Red Pill
- A Novel
- By: Hari Kunzru
- Narrated by: Hari Kunzru
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After receiving a prestigious writing fellowship in Germany, the narrator of Red Pill arrives in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee and struggles to accomplish anything at all. Instead of working on the book he has proposed to write, he takes long walks and binge-watches Blue Lives - a violent cop show that becomes weirdly compelling in its bleak, Darwinian view of life - and soon begins to wonder if his writing has any value at all.
-
-
Paranoia justified
- By Daved Baker on 11-05-20
By: Hari Kunzru
-
Missionaries
- A Novel
- By: Phil Klay
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews, Cynthia Farrell, Henry Leyva, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by US soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.
-
-
just not that good
- By MD on 11-21-20
By: Phil Klay
-
The Discomfort of Evening
- A Novel
- By: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, Michele Hutchison - translator
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother’s hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of “blush words” that aren’t in the Bible. One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family’s life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame.
-
-
Booker winner is a Downer
- By bjs on 09-05-20
By: Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, and others
-
A Girl Is a Body of Water
- By: Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
- Narrated by: Tovah Ott
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
International award-winning author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s novel is a sweeping and powerful portrait of a young girl and her family: who they are, what history has taken from them, and - most importantly - how they find their way back to each other. In her thirteenth year, Kirabo confronts a piercing question that has haunted her childhood: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small Ugandan village of Nattetta - her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts - but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow.
-
Monogamy
- A Novel
- By: Sue Miller
- Narrated by: Sue Miller
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Graham and Annie have been married for nearly 30 years. A golden couple, their seemingly effortless devotion has long been the envy of their circle of friends and acquaintances. Graham is a bookseller and a big, gregarious man with large appetites - curious, eager to please, a lover of life, and the convivial host of frequent, lively parties at his and Annie’s comfortable house in Cambridge. Annie, more reserved and introspective, is a photographer.
-
-
Monotonous
- By Susan G. on 10-16-20
By: Sue Miller
-
What Are You Going Through
- A Novel
- By: Sigrid Nunez
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 5 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: An ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people, the woman finds a common need: The urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences. The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener.
-
-
Brilliant, Insightful, Highly Relevant
- By Steve M on 12-11-20
By: Sigrid Nunez
-
The Office of Historical Corrections
- A Novella and Stories
- By: Danielle Evans
- Narrated by: Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Nicole Lewis, Brittany Pressley, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and x-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively.
-
-
blecch
- By Burns on 12-23-20
By: Danielle Evans
-
The Arrest
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Arrest isn’t post-apocalypse. It isn’t a dystopia. It isn’t a utopia. It’s just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers, and airplanes, for starters - quits working.... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in L.A. An old college friend, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn’t hurt. Now, post-Arrest, nothing is what it was. Sandy, who calls himself Journeyman, has landed in rural Maine.
-
-
Metaphors are alive and hold the page
- By Brian on 11-26-20
By: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher's Summary
Longlisted for the National Book Award
A wildly original cross-country novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies - national, individual, and collective - that drive and define us.
On the day of their estranged father's wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It's been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her freeloading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what's theirs. Except, instead of money, what their father gives them is information - a name - that both reveals a stunning family secret and compels them to come to grips with it. In the face of their new reality, the sisters and their adopted brother each set out on journeys that will test their faith in one another, as well as their definitions of freedom.
Moving from Seattle's underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the Southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, Vanessa Veselka spins a tale with boundless verve, linguistic vitality, and undeniable tenderness.
Critic Reviews
"The Great Offshore Grounds reminded me of what a great novel can do - Veselka's seafaring epic has the forward momentum of a grand adventure and the spiraling depth of a new myth. All the pleasure of eighteenth century storytelling renewed for our newborn millennium. I love this textured, tonally complex wonder of a book, a quest for Melville's 'unimaginable sublimity' that never shies away from the messy flux of the body, or the oceanic scope of our shared global history. It's also a blast to read - darkly hilarious, astral, cerebral, suspenseful, warm-blooded, divine." (Karen Russell, author of Orange World)
"I immediately fell in love with the phenomenal sisters at the heart of Vanessa Veselka's supernova of a new novel, The Great Offshore Grounds. This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in heart, and makes a helix between a novel of ideas and the best damn story of women who forge their identities on their own terms that I've read in years." (Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge)
"The Great Offshore Grounds delivers on the promise Vanessa Veselka made with her excellent debut, Zazen. Large in scope and heart, Veselka skillfully illustrates human behaviors of every shade and iteration. She’s a specialist, a keen interpreter of our demented society, and an enviable storyteller. I’ve been waiting long years for this novel. It was worth the wait." (Patrick deWitt, author of French Exit)
More from the same
What listeners say about The Great Offshore Grounds
Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- KnA
- 09-19-20
Epic Family (blood and chosen) Saga
if you enjoy metaphysics, metaphors, and musings on what it means to be family this book will satisfy. 3 very different women take 3 very different journeys
2 people found this helpful