A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Colette Whitaker
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By:
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Anthony Marra
About this listen
A resilient doctor risks everything to save the life of a hunted child, in this majestic debut about love, loss, and the unexpected ties that bind us together.
In his brilliant, haunting novel, Stegner Fellow and Whiting Award winner Anthony Marra transports us to a snow-covered village in Chechnya, where eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night, accusing him of aiding Chechen rebels. Across the road their lifelong neighbor and family friend Akhmed has also been watching, fearing the worst when the soldiers set fire to Havaa’s house. But when he finds her hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.
For the talented, tough-minded Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. And she has a deeply personal reason for caution: Harboring these refugees could easily jeopardize the return of her missing sister. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weave together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.
©2013 Anthony Marra (P)2013 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“ A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular. Not since Everything is Illuminated have I read a first novel so ambitious and fully realized. If this is where Anthony Marra begins his career, I can't imagine how far he will go.”
—Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto
“Remarkable and breathtaking, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a spellbinding elegy for an overlooked land engulfed by an oft forgotten war. Set in the all-too-real Chechen conflict, Marra conjures fragile and heartfelt characters whose fates interrogate the very underpinnings of love and sacrifice.”
—Adam Johnson , Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son
“A complex debut…[Marra writes] with elegant details about the physical and emotional destruction of occupation and war.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“[An] extraordinary first novel...Marra collapses time, sliding between 1996 and 2004 while also detailing events in a future yet to arrive, giving his searing novel an eerie, prophetic aura. All of the characters are closely tied together in ways that Marra takes his time revealing, even as he beautifully renders the way we long to connect and the lengths we will go to endure.” —Booklist (starred review)
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I'm So Glad I Listened to It!
- By Elizabeth on 08-22-16
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The Dutch Wife
- By: Ellen Keith
- Narrated by: Abby Craden, Eric Martin, Charlie Thurston
- Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Amsterdam, May 1943. As the Nazis tighten their grip across the city, the last signs of Dutch resistance are being swept away. Marijke de Graaf and her husband are arrested and deported to different concentration camps in Germany. Marijke is given a terrible choice: to suffer a slow death in the labor camp or - for a chance at survival - join the camp brothel. On the other side of the barbed wire, SS Officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to meet his father’s expectations of wartime glory. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, their lives change forever.
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Holocaust Porn???
- By Peteylovesyou on 08-03-19
By: Ellen Keith
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American War
- A Novel
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war.
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Best listen in years
- By odin on 04-08-17
By: Omar El Akkad
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The Patriots
- A Novel
- By: Sana Krasikov
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren, George Guidall
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Florence Fein grows up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, in a family that is gaining a foothold in the middle class. At City College she becomes engaged politically with the left-leaning student groups, and eventually, in the midst of the Depression, she takes a job with a trade organization that has a position for her in Moscow. There, she falls in love with another expatriate American and has a son. Soon after, Florence is sent to a work camp and her son to an orphanage.
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Point of View of characters, past and present collide
- By Angela Adams on 01-29-19
By: Sana Krasikov
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The Women in the Castle
- By: Jessica Shattuck
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Set at the end of World War II, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined - an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel from the author of the New York Times notable book The Hazards of Good Breeding.
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Skating On The Thin Ice Of Life
- By Sara on 04-29-17
By: Jessica Shattuck
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The War Girls
- By: V. S. Alexander
- Narrated by: Kelli Tager
- Length: 16 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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It's not just a thousand miles that separates Hanna Majewski from her younger sister, Stefa. There is another gulf—between the traditional Jewish ways that Hanna chose to leave behind in Warsaw, and her new, independent life in London. But as autumn of 1940 draws near, Germany begins a savage aerial bombing campaign in England, killing and displacing tens of thousands. Hanna, who narrowly escapes death, is recruited as a spy in an undercover operation that sends her back to her war-torn homeland.
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Courageous Sisters
- By Sara on 08-10-22
By: V. S. Alexander
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A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
- By: Brigid Pasulka
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The novel opens on the eve of World War II. In the mountain village of Half-Village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon, under the approving eyes of the entire village, courts the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska. But the war's arrival wreaks havoc in all their lives and delays their marriage for six long years.
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The Old & New Worlds Converge & Transcend Time
- By Sara on 11-22-16
By: Brigid Pasulka
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When the Moon Is Low
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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I, Who Did Not Die
- A Sweeping Story of Loss, Redemption, and Fate
- By: Zahed Haftlang, Najah Aboud
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Khorramshahr, Iran, May 1982 - It was the bloodiest battle of one of the most brutal wars of the twentieth century, and Najah, a 29-year-old wounded Iraqi conscript, was face to face with a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier who was ordered to kill him. Instead, the boy committed an astonishing act of mercy. It was an act that decades later would save his own life.
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- By jennie on 04-10-24
By: Zahed Haftlang, and others
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The Lost Wife
- A Novel
- By: Alyson Richman
- Narrated by: George Guidall, Suzanne Toren
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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In pre-war Prague, the dreams of two young lovers are shattered when they are separated by the Nazi invasion. Then, decades later, thousands of miles away in New York, there's an inescapable glance of recognition between two strangers. Providence is giving Lenka and Josef one more chance. From the glamorous ease of life in Prague before the Occupation, to the horrors of Nazi Europe, The Lost Wife explores the power of first love, the resilience of the human spirit, and the strength of memory.
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Love, Strength & Survival
- By Sara on 01-27-14
By: Alyson Richman
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Orphan Number Eight
- A Novel
- By: Kim van Alkemade
- Narrated by: Andi Arndt, Ginny Auer
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1919, Rachel Rabinowitz is a vivacious four-year-old living with her family in a crowded tenement on New York City's Lower East Side. When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother, Sam, and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans.
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Stopped after a few hours
- By Tamara on 01-03-20
By: Kim van Alkemade
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Fruit of the Drunken Tree
- A Novel
- By: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.
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Maybe better to read this book than listen???
- By Amazon Customer on 12-12-18
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The Romanov Conspiracy
- A Thriller
- By: Glenn Meade
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 17 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Dr. Laura Pavlov, an American forensic archaeologist, is about to unravel a mystery that promises to solve one of the twentieth century’s greatest enigmas. Dr. Pavlov is a member of an international team digging on the outskirts of the present-day Russian city of Ekaterinburg, where the Romanov royal family was executed by their captors in July 1918. When Pavlov discovers two bodies perfectly preserved in permafrost in a disused mine shaft, they offer dramatic new clues to the disappearance of the Romanovs and, in particular, their famous daughter, Princess Anastasia, whose murder has always been shrouded in doubt.
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Ho- Hum
- By monet on 10-03-12
By: Glenn Meade
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The Vagrants
- By: Yiyun Li
- Narrated by: Jackie Chung
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Yiyun Li is the winner of the prestigious Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. The Vagrants, set in 1979 China, is the story of those affected by the execution of a 28-year-old counterrevolutionary. Though suffering, Li's characters nevertheless struggle to maintain hope amid cruel circumstance.
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Lovely prose, good story, deadly narration
- By Athene on 05-10-13
By: Yiyun Li
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January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why.
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The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
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English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying the Kiona river tribe in the territory of New Guinea. Haunted by the memory of his brothers' deaths and increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when a chance encounter with colleagues, the controversial Nell Stone and her wry and mercurial Australian husband, Fen, pulls him back from the brink. Nell and Fen have just fled the bloodthirsty Mumbanyo and, in spite of Nell's poor health, are hungry for a new discovery.
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Anthropologists in Love
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Clear
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John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted.
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Stunning narrative and performance
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Two women develop a groundbreaking surgery: the Cesarean section. It's a highly dangerous procedure and the research is grueling, but even worse is the vitriolic response from men. Most don't trust the findings of women, and many can choose to deny their wives medical care. Already facing resistance on all sides, Nora is shaken when she meets a patient who will die without the surgery. If the procedure is successful, her work could change the world. But a failure could cost everything: precious lives, Nora's career, and the role women will be allowed to play in medicine.
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Love it!
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The Corrections
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The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century--a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes. After almost 50 years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
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"Grandly Entertaining"? Really?
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What listeners say about A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
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- Julie A Hoffstadt
- 06-12-13
Beautiful
This book took my breath away. If you liked Kite Runner, you will enjoy this as well.
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Overall
- Kindle Customer
- 07-13-19
brilliant
loved it! beautifully written. sometimes I had to stop the audio and let the sentence soak in. captured human emotion and random, senseless destruction of war so well. brilliant character development
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- Tom Whelan
- 05-07-19
Very well read. Enjoyed the story
Loved the narrator. She did a fantastic job.
It's the kind of story that jumps around a lot (in time).
I'm not always so happy about that, hence 4 stars. Very well written.
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- Eugene
- 03-03-16
Brilliant
Portrays the struggle to retain humanity in the face of an awful chapter of history. Warfare is the ultimate villain an in the end an uplifting tale. Top notch writing craft.
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- Britt Reints
- 08-10-21
Unexpected, beautiful
It was captivating and touching, a beautiful tribute to the ways we are all connected. It's rare to find a book that is beautifully written and good storytelling - for some reason authors tend to choose one or the other. This book does both.
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- Elizabeth
- 05-03-15
Achingly heartbreaking, beautifully written.
The is a haunting, beautiful story of war, redemption, subverted history, sacrifice, betrayal, and deep love. The reader is excellent.
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- Sara B.
- 11-05-23
Powerful, beautiful and haunting
An amazing story of love, sacrifice, and redemption. This is my first exposure to this author, and I am humbled by his writing, and his insights into human nature.
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- natph
- 01-30-24
Beautiful and Poignant
I liked learning about Chechnya, but the people we met in the pages were heartbreaking!
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- Syd Young
- 05-20-14
Read it to Know this Quote
I didn't love this book like everyone else did, but I do feel like I should have. I'm just not as big on the big interlocking short story book (meaning that this was a series of stories about the lives of the characters in this book, not pulling together the way they do in a big epic, but rather connected the way stars are, because we see the connection, we see the pattern even if it is random), and that is what this felt like to me. But I did love some of the thoughts that were universal, and not just applicable in war torn Chechnya, especially this one as it applies to the way we humans interweave and support each other or not: “Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.” I am also glad I learned more about that conflict.
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10 people found this helpful
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- jackie
- 04-20-15
One of the best books I've ever read
I'm in love with this book! Marra is a top-notch story teller. I loved the way that the story jumped from different character perspectives throughout the decade-long story. Every sentence, every word was thoughtfully and beautifully constructed. The story is so sad and overwhelming and heartwarming and heart-wrenching all at the same time. A MUST READ! Im anxiously waiting for Marra's next book.
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1 person found this helpful