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The Shape of the Ruins
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Sheldon Romero
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
A sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions - the much anticipated masterpiece from Juan Gabriel Vásquez.
The Shape of the Ruins is a masterly story of conspiracy, political obsession, and literary investigation. When a man is arrested at a museum for attempting to steal the bullet-ridden suit of a murdered Colombian politician, few notice. But soon this thwarted theft takes on greater meaning as it becomes a thread in a widening web of popular fixations with conspiracy theories, assassinations, and historical secrets; and it haunts those who feel that only they know the real truth behind these killings.
This novel explores the darkest moments of a country's past and brings to life the ways in which past violence shapes our present lives. A compulsive read, beautiful and profound, eerily relevant to our times and deeply personal, The Shape of the Ruins is a tour-de-force story by a master at uncovering the incisive wounds of our memories.
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What listeners say about The Shape of the Ruins
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Radhakrishna Bettadapura
- 11-17-18
Uncanny valley between fiction and non
And doesn't work as either. Some effective moments, like the one in the hospital. A deep sense of history.
Narrative isn't so well managed. Uribe Uribe turns up somewhere in the middle and somehow becomes the subject, in a protracted interlude that really belongs in another novel. The main thread resumes only to fizzle out.
Performance is okay. Some speech defects here and there. Inflections don't change between characters, making dialogue often difficult to follow.
Overall, needs some workshopping to fix.
4 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Chris
- 04-25-20
Great Book
I highly recommend this book. In addition to being eye opening it's filled with gems
1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 12-25-22
Epic and Brilliant
A book about the creation of a book. A detailed history of Uribe and Gaitan and Colombia, ripe with imaginations and conspiracy theories. A book whose nooks and twists make if almost impossible to describe, bug what a pleasure to hear or read. Challenging. Extraordinary. The reading is first rate.
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-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 84
Numero Zero is the feverish and delightfully readable tale of a ghostwriter in Milan whose work pulls him into an underworld of media politics and murderous conspiracies (involving the cadaver of Mussolini's double, naturally). This novel is vintage Eco - corrupt newspapers, clandestine plots, imaginary histories - and will appeal to his many readers and earn him legions of new ones.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Numero NADA!
- By Darwin8u on 11-19-15
By: Umberto Eco
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The Secret in Their Eyes
- A Novel
- By: Eduardo Sacheri
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 131
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 117
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Story4 out of 5 stars 118
ín Chaparro is a retired detective still obsessed by the brutal, decades-old rape and murder of a young married woman in her own bedroom. While attempting to write a book about the case, he revisits the details of the investigation. As he reaches into the past, Chaparro also recalls the beginning of his long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Set in the Buenos Aires of the 1970s, Sacheri’s tale reveals the underpinnings of Argentina’s Dirty War and takes on the question of justice - what it really means and in whose hands it belongs.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Movie Must Be Better Than the Book
- By Kelli on 04-15-12
By: Eduardo Sacheri
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Snow
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 18 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 474
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 285
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Story4 out of 5 stars 286
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.
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3 out of 5 stars
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All the good & bad that is Pamuk
- By Elizabeth on 08-13-07
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Return
- Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between
- By: Hisham Matar
- Narrated by: Hisham Matar
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 943
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 843
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 844
When Hisham Matar was a 19-year-old university student in England, his father was kidnapped. One of the Qaddafi regime's most prominent opponents in exile, he was held in a secret prison in Libya. Hisham would never see him again. But he never gave up hope that his father might still be alive. "Hope," as he writes, "is cunning and persistent." Twenty-two years later, after the fall of Qaddafi, the prison cells were empty, and there was no sign of Jaballa Matar. Hisham returned with his mother and wife to the homeland he never thought he'd go back to again.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Touching memoir. Consider hard copy
- By Joschka Philipps on 02-22-18
By: Hisham Matar
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Distant Star
- By: Roberto Bolano
- Narrated by: Walter Krochmal
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 56
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4 out of 5 stars 49
A chilling novel about the nightmare of a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. The star of Roberto Bolano's hair-raising novel Distant Star is Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, an air force pilot who exploits the 1973 coup to launch his own version of the New Chilean Poetry, a multimedia enterprise involving sky-writing, poetry, torture, and photo exhibitions. For our unnamed narrator, who first encounters this "star" in a college poetry workshop, Ruiz-Tagle becomes the silent hand behind every evil act in the darkness of Pinochet's regime.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Omg
- By Sierra on 08-03-16
By: Roberto Bolano
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Even the Darkest Night
- A Terra Alta Novel
- By: Javier Cercas, Anne McLean - translator
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 35
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 28
Melchor, the son of a prostitute, went to prison as a teenager, convicted of working for a Colombian drug cartel. Behind bars, he read a book that changed his life: Les Misérables. Then his mother was murdered. He decided to become a cop. This new case, in Terra Alta, a remote region of rural Catalonia—the murder of a wealthy local man and his wife—will turn Melchor’s life upside down yet again.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Ok
- By SB on 07-08-22
By: Javier Cercas, and others
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The Man from Beijing
- By: Henning Mankell, Laurie Thompson - translator
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 15 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 832
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 409
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Story4 out of 5 stars 406
January 2006. In the Swedish hamlet of Hesjvallen, nineteen people have been massacred. The only clue is a red ribbon found at the scene. Judge Birgitta Roslin has particular reason to be shocked: Her grandparents, the Andrns, are among the victims, and Birgitta soon learns that an Andrn family in Nevada has also been murdered. She then discovers the 19th-century diary of an Andrn ancestora gang master on the American transcontinental railwaythat describes brutal treatment of Chinese slave workers.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A new level of writing from Henning Mankell
- By G. on 02-20-10
By: Henning Mankell, and others
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Frankenstein in Baghdad
- A Novel
- By: Ahmed Saadawi
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 197
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 173
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Story4 out of 5 stars 171
From the rubble-strewn streets of US-occupied Baghdad, Hadi - a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café - collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I was fascinated the entire time
- By Tinkerbuff on 09-20-19
By: Ahmed Saadawi
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HHhH
- By: Laurent Binet
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 215
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 187
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 189
HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible-until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service-killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Himlers Hirn heisst Heydrich
- By Darwin8u on 02-02-13
By: Laurent Binet
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Ratking
- Aurelio Zen, Book 1
- By: Michael Dibdin
- Narrated by: Michael Kitchen
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 202
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 178
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Story4 out of 5 stars 176
A powerful industrialist, Ruggiero Miletti, is kidnapped. Inspector Zen is transferred to Perugia to take over the case - but finds that there are many obstacles in his way. The local authorities see him as an interloper, and the victim’s family, one of the most powerful in Italy, seem content to let Miletti languish in the hands of his abductors. Zen has crossed swords with the establishment before - and lost. Can he succeed this time?
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2 out of 5 stars
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Narrator spoiled it for me
- By Gregory Aurand on 12-15-13
By: Michael Dibdin
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The Meursault Investigation
- By: Kamel Daoud, John Cullen - translator
- Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 186
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 157
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 159
He was the brother of "the Arab" killed by the infamous Meursault, the antihero of Camus' classic novel. Seventy years after that event, Harun, who has lived since childhood in the shadow of his sibling's memory, refuses to let him remain anonymous: He gives his brother a story and a name - Musa - and describes the events that led to Musa's casual murder on a dazzlingly sunny beach.
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4 out of 5 stars
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An enthralling double feature!
- By Kaui on 06-28-16
By: Kamel Daoud, and others
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The Shadow of the Wind
- By: Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 6,449
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5,021
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5,036
Barcelona, 1945: Just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his 11th birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother's face. To console his only child, Daniel's widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona's guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Have the book handy
- By Rebecca on 07-17-05
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Death with Interruptions
- By: Margaret Jull Costa - translator, José Saramago
- Narrated by: Paul Baymer
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 385
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 345
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Story4 out of 5 stars 344
On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration - flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home....
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4 out of 5 stars
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It's actually two books...
- By Rebecca Garrison on 11-29-18
By: Margaret Jull Costa - translator, and others
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Reading Lolita in Tehran
- A Memoir in Books
- By: Azar Nafisi
- Narrated by: Azar Nafisi
- Length: 17 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 431
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 375
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Story4 out of 5 stars 372
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov.
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1 out of 5 stars
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A literary critique of Russian lit.
- By Amazon Customer on 04-15-16
By: Azar Nafisi
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,050
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 792
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Story4 out of 5 stars 799
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Shadow District
- By: Arnaldur Indridason
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 654
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 590
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Story4 out of 5 stars 591
A 90-year-old man is found dead in his bed, smothered with his own pillow. On his desk, the police find newspaper cuttings about a murder case dating from the Second World War, when a young woman was found strangled behind Reykjavik's National Theatre. Konrad, a former detective, is bored with retirement and remembers the crime. He grew up in "the shadow district", a rough neighborhood bordered by the National Theatre. Why would someone be interested in that crime now?
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5 out of 5 stars
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A slow burn!
- By Rosemary Wells on 12-12-17
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The Red-Haired Woman
- A Novel
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee, Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 7 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 86
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 76
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Story4 out of 5 stars 75
On the outskirts of a town 30 miles from Istanbul, a master well digger and his young apprentice are hired to find water on a barren plain. As they struggle in the summer heat, excavating without luck meter by meter, the two will develop a filial bond neither has known before - not the poor middle-aged bachelor nor the middle-class boy whose father disappeared after being arrested for politically subversive activities. The pair will come to depend on each other and exchange stories reflecting disparate views of the world.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Drags On
- By T. Conrad on 10-25-17
By: Orhan Pamuk
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The Italian Secretary
- By: Caleb Carr
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 570
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 299
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 297
The best-selling author of the Alienist series returns with a chilling elaboration on the Sherlock Holmes canon, as the famed detective investigates a pair of gruesome murders, which cast an otherworldly shadow as far as Queen Victoria herself.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A True Delight for the Holmes Enthusiast
- By Sagar on 06-03-05
By: Caleb Carr