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Transparent City
- Narrated by: Sam Peters
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
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Transparent City
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Publisher's summary
A Vanity Fair Hot Type Book for April 2018
A Globe and Mail Best Book of 2018
A Lit Hub Favourite Book of the Year
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Honor
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno, Piter Marik
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 109
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 94
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 91
An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London. Internationally best-selling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Complex but Compelling
- By Cariola on 04-14-13
By: Elif Shafak
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The Satanic Verses
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1,853
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 1,605
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Story4 out of 5 stars 1,595
Inextricably linked with the fatwa called against its author in the wake of the novel’s publication, The Satanic Verses is, beyond that, a rich showcase for Salman Rushdie’s comic sensibilities, cultural observations, and unparalleled mastery of language. The book begins with two Indians plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their airliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Use an audiobook to really enjoy Satanic Verses
- By David Edelberg on 11-24-12
By: Salman Rushdie
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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Deborah Moggach
- Narrated by: Juliet Mills
- Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 267
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 232
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Story4 out of 5 stars 231
When Ravi Kapoor, an overworked London doctor, reaches the breaking point with his difficult father-in-law, he asks his wife: “Can’t we just send him away somewhere? Somewhere far, far away.” His prayer is seemingly answered when Ravi’s entrepreneurial cousin sets up a retirement home in India, hoping to re-create in Bangalore an elegant lost corner of England. Several retirees are enticed by the promise of indulgent living at a bargain price, but upon arriving, they are dismayed to find that restoration of the once sophisiticated hotel has stalled....
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3 out of 5 stars
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Screenwriters Changed it for the Better
- By Carole T. on 06-05-12
By: Deborah Moggach
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The Kindly Ones
- By: Jonathan Littell
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 39 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 291
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 217
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Story4 out of 5 stars 216
The chilling fictional memoir of Dr. Maximilien Aue, a former Nazi officer who has reinvented himself, many years after the war, as a middle-class family man and factory owner in France. Max is an intellectual steeped in philosophy, literature, and classical music. He is also a cold-blooded assassin and the consummate bureaucrat. Through the eyes of this cultivated yet monstrous man, we experience in disturbingly precise detail the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi genocide of the Jews.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Office politics in hell
- By Maine Colonial 🌲 on 04-02-13
By: Jonathan Littell
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Blindness
- By: José Saramago
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 2,576
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2,116
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Story4 out of 5 stars 2,119
A city is hit by a sudden and strange epidemic of "white blindness", which spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there social conventions quickly crumble and the struggle for survival brings out the worst in people.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Surrealistic
- By Richard Pesavento on 10-04-08
By: José Saramago
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Pietr the Latvian
- Inspector Maigret, Book 1
- By: Georges Simenon, David Bellos - translator
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 887
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 784
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 783
The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Long live Maigret
- By Adeliese Baumann on 11-19-14
By: Georges Simenon, and others
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Echoes of a Distant Summer
- By: Guy Johnson
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 32 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 376
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 322
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Story5 out of 5 stars 323
The son of Maya Angelou, Guy Johnson is a critically acclaimed author and poet in his own right. Echoes of a Distant Summer is the story of Jackson St. Clair Tremain, a San Francisco civil servant who thought he had left his old life far behind. In 1982, Jackson is summoned to Mexico to confer with his dying grandfather, the brutal hustler King Tremain. When King dies, Jackson inherits $50 million - and the unwanted attentions of a malevolent bayou crime lord named Pug DuMont.
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5 out of 5 stars
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"You Best Say Joe Cause You Sho' Don't Know!"
- By R. Pontiflet on 04-13-17
By: Guy Johnson
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Midnight Cowboy
- By: James Leo Herlihy
- Narrated by: Michael Urie
- Length: 7 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 118
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 104
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 105
Midnight Cowboy is considered by many to be one of the best American novels published since World War II. The main story centers around Joe Buck, a naive but eager and ambitious young Texan, who decides to leave his dead-end job in search of a grand and glamorous life he believes he will find in New York City. But the city turns out to be a much more difficult place to negotiate than Joe could ever have imagined. He soon finds himself and his dreams compromised. Buck's fall from innocence and his relationship with the crippled street hustler Ratso Rizzo form the novel's emotional nucleus.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Superb
- By Macala Shon on 01-26-21
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Single & Single
- By: John le Carré
- Narrated by: Michael Jayston
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 319
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 285
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 283
A lawyer from the London finance house of Single & Single is shot dead on a Turkish hillside by people with whom he thought he was in business. A children's magician is asked by his bank to explain the unsolicited arrival of more than five million pounds sterling in his young daughter's modest trust. A freighter bound for Liverpool is boarded by Russian coast guards in the Black Sea. The celebrated London merchant venturer "Tiger" Single disappears into thin air.
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4 out of 5 stars
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The spy who came back to the bank
- By Darwin8u on 03-12-14
By: John le Carré
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Maya's Notebook
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Maria Cabezas
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 410
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 359
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 361
Neglected by her parents, 19-year-old Maya Nidal has grown up in Berkeley with her grandparents. Her grandmother Nini is a force of nature, a woman whose formidable strength helped her build a new life after emigrating from Chile in 1973. Popo, Maya's grandfather, is a gentle man whose solid, comforting presence helps calm the turbulence of Maya's adolescence. When Popo dies of cancer, Maya goes completely off the rails, turning to drugs, alcohol, and petty crime in a downward spiral that eventually bottoms out in Las Vegas.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Narrator ruins this book
- By R.J. Mulder on 05-13-14
By: Isabel Allende
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The Darling
- By: Russell Banks
- Narrated by: Mary Beth Hurt
- Length: 14 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 378
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 128
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Story4 out of 5 stars 133
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave's story, told emotionally and convincingly years later by Hannah herself. A political radical and member of the Weather Underground, Hannah has fled America to West Africa, where she and her Liberian husband become friends and colleagues of Charles Taylor, the notorious warlord and now ex-president of Liberia. When Taylor leaves for the United States in an effort to escape embezzlement charges, he's immediately placed in prison.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Complex and compelling
- By Ellen H. Anderson on 02-05-05
By: Russell Banks
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The Attack
- By: Yasmina Khadra
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 249
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 94
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Story4 out of 5 stars 96
Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a respected, dedicated surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He has learned to live with the violence that plagues his city and works tirelessly to help the victims brought to the emergency room. But one night, a deadly bombing in a local restaurant takes a horrifyingly personal turn, when his wife's body is found among the dead, bearing injuries that match those typically found on the bodies of fundamentalist suicide bombers.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Powerful
- By Diana - Audible on 04-17-12
By: Yasmina Khadra
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Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions
- Auntie Poldi, Book 1
- By: Mario Giordano
- Narrated by: Matt Addis
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 98
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Story4 out of 5 stars 88
Auntie Poldi can think of no finer place to wait for death than Sicily. All she asks is a sea view, fine wine (and plenty of it), and her family close around. When death instead takes her handsome young friend Valentino - and under mysterious circumstances at that - Poldi will not take it lying down. Perhaps it's in her blood, but Auntie Poldi's hunting instincts have never felt more alive. Justice must be served - if it's the last thing she does....
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5 out of 5 stars
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More fun and murder in Sicily!
- By MolllyT on 02-19-18
By: Mario Giordano
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Putney
- A Novel
- By: Sofka Zinovieff
- Narrated by: Michelle Ford
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 50
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Story4 out of 5 stars 49
In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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5 out of 5 stars
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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Ordinary Thunderstorms
- A Novel
- By: William Boyd
- Narrated by: Gideon Emery
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 235
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 149
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Story4 out of 5 stars 149
One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Amazing Story Teller
- By Dorothy on 09-07-14
By: William Boyd