
A Gorgeous Excitement
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Rebecca Lowman
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By:
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Cynthia Weiner
About this listen
One young woman’s summer of infinite possibility takes a turn she never saw coming in “this 1980s coming-of-age tale [that’s] chillingly compelling. Get ready to be transported.”—People (Best Books of the Month)
AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NEW THRILLER • A TOWN & COUNTRY AND CRIMEREADS MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK
“I haven’t felt this kind of excitement reading a story set in the ’80s since I first discovered Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis.”—Margarita Montimore, bestselling author of Oona Out of Order
There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.
Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?
Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,” but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.
©2025 Cynthia Weiner (P)2025 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Going Home is a sparkling, funny, bighearted story of family and what happens when three men—all of whom are completely ill-suited for fatherhood—take charge of a toddler following an unexpected loss.
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Great Story
- By E G Neufeld on 03-12-25
By: Tom Lamont
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Sit, Cinderella, Sit
- A Mostly True Memoir
- By: Lisa Cheek
- Narrated by: Lisa Cheek
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Told with humor and heart through a fairy tale lens, with flashbacks into the author’s not-always-happy childhood, Sit, Cinderella, Sit is a story about what can happen when you take a leap of faith, look and hear beyond people’s differences, and dare to believe in yourself.
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The sweet approachable stories. Dogs woven with fairytale, woven with memoir, woven with travel, loved it!
- By Anonymous User on 05-03-25
By: Lisa Cheek
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O Sinners!
- A Novel
- By: Nicole Cuffy
- Narrated by: JD Jackson, SEVAN
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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After the death of his father, a young journalist named Faruq Zaidi takes the opportunity to embed himself in a mysterious cult based in the California redwoods and known as “the nameless,” whose strikingly attractive members adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as “all suffering is distortion” and “see only beauty.”
By: Nicole Cuffy
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The Family Fang
- By: Kevin Wilson
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang dedicated themselves to making great art. But when an artist's work lies in subverting normality, it can be difficult to raise well-adjusted children. Just ask Buster and Annie Fang. For as long as they can remember, they starred (unwillingly) in their parents' madcap pieces. But now that they are grown up, the chaos of their childhood has made it difficult to cope with life outside the fishbowl of their parents' strange world.
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Beautiful, Heart-wrenching, Shocking.
- By Amanda on 11-18-11
By: Kevin Wilson
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The Note
- A Novel
- By: Alafair Burke
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up, May Hanover was a good girl, always. Well-behaved, top of her class, a compulsive rule-follower. Raised by a first-generation Chinese single mother with high expectations, May didn’t have room to slip up, let alone fail. Her friends didn’t call her the Little Sheriff for nothing. But even good girls have secrets. And regrets. When it comes to her friendship with Lauren and Kelsey, she's had her fair share of both.
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Distracting Narration
- By carol miller on 01-15-25
By: Alafair Burke
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Beta Vulgaris
- A Novel
- By: Margie Sarsfield
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, hoping the paycheck from the sugar beet harvest will cover the rent on their Brooklyn apartment. Amidst the grueling work and familiar anxieties about her finances, Elise starts noticing strange things: threatening phone calls, a mysterious rash, and snatches of an ominous voice coming from the beet pile. When Tom and other coworkers begin to vanish, Elise is left alone to confront the weight of her past, the horrors of her uncertain future, and the menacing but enticing siren song of the beets.
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The awful personality of the main character.
- By Gina Q. on 02-16-25
By: Margie Sarsfield
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The Wedding Dress Sewing Circle
- A Novel
- By: Jennifer Ryan
- Narrated by: Sophie Roberts
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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After renowned fashion designer Cressida Westcott loses both her home and her design house in the London Blitz, she has nowhere to go but the family manor house she fled decades ago. Praying that her niece and nephew will be more hospitable than her brother had been, she arrives with nothing but the clothes she stands in, at a loss as to how to rebuild her business while staying in a quaint country village.
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Delightful historical fiction
- By Kindle Customer on 01-01-23
By: Jennifer Ryan
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Lucky Night
- A Novel
- By: Eliza Kennedy
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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After six years of a stolen hour here, another there, tonight is going to be different for Nick Holloway and Jenny Parrish. They’ve booked a room in a new luxury hotel in Manhattan, where they’ll spend the entire night together for the first time. Expectations are running high for this brief reprieve from ordinary life: they both need a good bout of ravishing sex and witty conversation. But that’s not what they get. Because they’ve barely gotten started when a smoke alarm goes off.
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Good for teens
- By Sam Farah on 04-10-25
By: Eliza Kennedy
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Clever Little Thing
- A Novel
- By: Helena Echlin
- Narrated by: Ashley Tucker
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte’s daughter Stella is sensitive and brilliant, perhaps even a genius, but a recent change in her behavior has alarmed her mother. Following the sudden death of Stella’s babysitter, Blanka, the once disruptive and anti-social child has become docile and agreeable. But what’s unsettling is that she has begun to mirror Blanka’s personality, from Blanka’s repetitive phrases to her accent, to fierce cravings for Armenian meat stew after being raised a vegetarian.
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Slow but keeps you interested
- By Autumn Sullivan on 03-08-25
By: Helena Echlin
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Death Takes Me
- A Novel
- By: Cristina Rivera Garza, Robin Myers - translator, Sarah Booker - translator
- Narrated by: Tony Chiroldes, Lee Osorio, Ines del Castillo, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A professor named Cristina Rivera Garza stumbles upon the corpse of a mutilated man in a dark alley and reports it to the police. When shown a crime scene photo, she finds a stark warning written in tiny print with coral nail polish on the brick wall beside the body: “Beware of me, my love / beware of the silent woman in the desert.”
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So confusing
- By Amazon Customer on 06-03-25
By: Cristina Rivera Garza, and others
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The Boyhood of Cain
- By: Michael Amherst
- Narrated by: Jot Davies
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the shadow of an ancient abbey nestled between rivers, Daniel is growing up. He is highly intelligent but little understood by his parents, and a secret passion burns inside him for love and recognition. When his father loses his job as the headmaster of the local school, his family stumbles into a rural life for which they are ill-prepared. Daniel’s sole solace is the arrival of Philip, a new boy at school, whom he worships with a confused intensity.
By: Michael Amherst
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My Good Bright Wolf
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah Moss
- Narrated by: Morven Christie
- Length: 8 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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A girl must watch her figure but never be vain. She must be intelligent but never a know-it-all. She must be ambitious, if she is clever, but not in a way that shows. She must cook and sew and make do and mend. She must know (but never say) that these skills are, in some fundamental way, flawed and frivolous—feminine. Girls must stay small, even as they grow. Women must show restraint. And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free.
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A brilliant thinker.
- By Sarah Steinberg on 12-05-24
By: Sarah Moss
Night Club Scene
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Incredible in every way.
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Felt it needed more editing and maturity
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It was long and drawn out, could have made it much shorter.
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SOOO good.
Juicy, but wise, but touching too
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