A Quitter's Paradise
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Angela Lin
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By:
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Elysha Chang
About this listen
In A Quitter’s Paradise, the darkly humorous debut by bold, new voice Elysha Chang, a young woman does everything she can to ignore her mother’s death, even as unearthed family secrets become increasingly inextricable from her own.
Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she’s hiding things from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn’t understand the person you’ve lost?
Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path that will force her to confront her present. After a series of incidents—and some questionable choices—it becomes clear that no matter how hard Eleanor tries, she will never be able to escape her grief, or her family, despite her wildest attempts. But will she be brave enough to withstand the reckoning she’s hurtling toward?
At once disarmingly provocative and compulsively enjoyable, A Quitter’s Paradise interweaves Eleanor’s story with her parents’ in an unexpectedly funny study of the beauty and contradictions of family bonds and self-knowledge, exploring the ways we unwittingly guard the secrets of our loved ones, even from ourselves.
©2023 Elysha Chang (P)2023 SJP LitListeners also enjoyed...
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In 1916, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post-Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of the North. But soon they learn that even in Vauxhall, New Jersey, black women are mainly hired for domestic work, money is scarce, children don’t progress in school, and black men die young. Within a few short years, both women’s husbands are dead. Left to navigate this unwelcoming place alone, Celia and Lucy turn to one another for support in raising their children far from home.
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Era
- By Red Shopper on 09-22-24
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Women and Children First
- A Novel
- By: Alina Grabowski
- Narrated by: Abigail Reno, EJ Lavery, Maria McCann, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town’s industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper.
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The Relationships of Mother’s & Daughters!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-30-24
By: Alina Grabowski
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They Dream in Gold
- A Novel
- By: Mai Sennaar
- Narrated by: Julia Kwamya
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Bonnie and Mansour meet in New York in 1968—his piercing gaze in a downtown jazz club threatening to carry her away—their connection is undeniable. Both from fractured homes, with childhoods spent crossing the Atlantic, they quickly find peace with each other. And as Mansour’s soaring Senegalese melodies continue to break new ground, keeping time with the sound of revolution and taking him and Bonnie from Paris to Rio and Switzerland, it seems as though happiness might finally be around the corner for them both.
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Hard Read
- By Kawanna on 10-01-24
By: Mai Sennaar
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A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Marra
- Narrated by: Colette Whitaker
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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.
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A Conflicted Response
- By Cariola on 09-24-13
By: Anthony Marra
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A Place for Us
- A Novel
- By: Fatima Farheen Mirza
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia, their headstrong eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride.
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Started on Audible, finished with a book in my hand
- By CO Mom on 09-17-18
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An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club)
- A Novel
- By: Tayari Jones
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Eisa Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.
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So many “WTF” moments
- By Kristen R King on 05-04-18
By: Tayari Jones
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Coleman Hill
- A Novel
- By: Kim Coleman Foote
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin, Dion Graham
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In 1916, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post-Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of the North. But soon they learn that even in Vauxhall, New Jersey, black women are mainly hired for domestic work, money is scarce, children don’t progress in school, and black men die young. Within a few short years, both women’s husbands are dead. Left to navigate this unwelcoming place alone, Celia and Lucy turn to one another for support in raising their children far from home.
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-
Era
- By Red Shopper on 09-22-24
-
Women and Children First
- A Novel
- By: Alina Grabowski
- Narrated by: Abigail Reno, EJ Lavery, Maria McCann, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nashquitten, MA, is a decaying coastal enclave that not even tourist season can revive, full of locals who have run the town’s industries for generations. When a young woman dies at a house party, the circumstances around her death suspiciously unclear, the tight-knit community is shaken. As a mother grieves her daughter, a teacher her student, a best friend her confidante, the events around the tragedy become a lightning rod: blame is cast, secrets are buried deeper.
-
-
The Relationships of Mother’s & Daughters!
- By Amazon Customer on 06-30-24
By: Alina Grabowski
-
They Dream in Gold
- A Novel
- By: Mai Sennaar
- Narrated by: Julia Kwamya
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Bonnie and Mansour meet in New York in 1968—his piercing gaze in a downtown jazz club threatening to carry her away—their connection is undeniable. Both from fractured homes, with childhoods spent crossing the Atlantic, they quickly find peace with each other. And as Mansour’s soaring Senegalese melodies continue to break new ground, keeping time with the sound of revolution and taking him and Bonnie from Paris to Rio and Switzerland, it seems as though happiness might finally be around the corner for them both.
-
-
Hard Read
- By Kawanna on 10-01-24
By: Mai Sennaar
-
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Marra
- Narrated by: Colette Whitaker
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
A Conflicted Response
- By Cariola on 09-24-13
By: Anthony Marra
-
A Place for Us
- A Novel
- By: Fatima Farheen Mirza
- Narrated by: Deepti Gupta, Sunil Malhotra
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia, their headstrong eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride.
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-
Started on Audible, finished with a book in my hand
- By CO Mom on 09-17-18
-
An American Marriage (Oprah’s Book Club)
- A Novel
- By: Tayari Jones
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden, Eisa Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding.
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So many “WTF” moments
- By Kristen R King on 05-04-18
By: Tayari Jones
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Clear
- A Novel
- By: Carys Davies
- Narrated by: Russ Bain
- Length: 3 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
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
- By Art Librarian on 07-01-24
By: Carys Davies
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Pretty Boys Are Poisonous
- Poems
- By: Megan Fox
- Narrated by: Megan Fox
- Length: 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“These poems were written in an attempt to excise the illness that had taken root in me because of my silence. I’ve spent my entire life keeping the secrets of men, my body aches from carrying the weight of their sins. My freedom lives in these pages, and I hope that my words can inspire others to take back their happiness and their identity by using their voice to illuminate what’s been buried, but not forgotten, in the darkness,” says Fox.
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Moving
- By Kacey Lewis on 11-17-23
By: Megan Fox
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Middlesex
- By: Jeffrey Eugenides
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 21 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop physically - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
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Anything but middle.
- By Michael on 05-04-03
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The Dinner
- A Novel
- By: Herman Koch, Sam Garrett - translator
- Narrated by: Clive Mantle
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It's a summer's evening in Amsterdam, and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant for dinner. Between mouthfuls of food and over the polite scrapings of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of polite discourse - the banality of work, the triviality of the holidays. But behind the empty words, terrible things need to be said, and with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened. Each couple has a 15-year-old son. The two boys are united by their accountability for a single horrific act; an act that has triggered a police investigation and shattered the comfortable, insulated worlds of their families.
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The Axis II Dinner Club
- By Mel on 04-12-13
By: Herman Koch, and others
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The Idiot
- By: Elif Batuman
- Narrated by: Elif Batuman
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself. The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary.
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Fascinating point of view
- By Amazon Customer on 04-21-17
By: Elif Batuman
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Family Happiness
- By: Laurie Colwin
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
To the rest of the world, Polly Solo-Miller Demarest lives a charmed life. She has a beautiful home, a dashing lawyer husband, and two delightful children. But beneath this idyllic surface, the pressure of being the “perfect flower” of an illustrious family—and a stable, always-available wife, mother, and daughter—are getting to her. The spark has gone out of her marriage, and to her own surprise, she’s having an affair. What follows is at once cathartic and provoking, and both may be necessary states in order for Polly to become the kind of person she wants to be.
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Dashed hopes….
- By Marie on 12-14-22
By: Laurie Colwin
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Crossroads
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Franzen
- Narrated by: David Pittu
- Length: 24 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jonathan Franzen’s novels are celebrated for their unforgettably vivid characters and for their keen-eyed take on contemporary America. Now, in Crossroads, Franzen ventures back into the past and explores the history of two generations. With characteristic humor and complexity, and with even greater warmth, he conjures a world that resonates powerfully with our own.
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How do narrators still do clownish stuff like this in 2021?
- By Hotrodimus on 10-30-21
By: Jonathan Franzen
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Entitlement
- A Novel
- By: Rumaan Alam
- Narrated by: Nicole Lewis
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Brooke wants. She isn’t in need, but there are things she wants. A sense of purpose, for instance. She wants to make a difference in the world, to impress her mother along the way, to spend time with friends and secure her independence. Her job assisting an octogenarian billionaire in his quest to give away a vast fortune could help her achieve many of these goals. It may inspire new desires as well: proximity to wealth turns out to be nothing less than transformative. What is money, really, but a kind of belief?
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so disappointing
- By K. Wagner on 09-22-24
By: Rumaan Alam
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In Memoriam
- A Novel
- By: Alice Winn
- Narrated by: Christian Coulson
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting. Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle—an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood—without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return
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Amazing
- By Henry on 03-21-23
By: Alice Winn
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
- A Novel
- By: Ocean Vuong
- Narrated by: Ocean Vuong
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late 20s, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born - a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation.
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Beautifully written, but painful.
- By NB on 06-10-19
By: Ocean Vuong
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The Bee Sting
- A Novel
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, and others
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
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Bone Clocks meets Jonathan Franzen
- By Cranson on 10-26-23
By: Paul Murray
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
- By: Khaled Hosseini
- Narrated by: Atossa Leoni
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss, and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them, in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul, they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation.
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Completely brilliant
- By Suze Weinberg on 06-01-07
By: Khaled Hosseini
What listeners say about A Quitter's Paradise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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- DG
- 06-28-23
sad story that goes nowhere.
leaves you depleted. sad people that don't get happier. no uplifting ending to it.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-05-23
Disappointing
Saw interview with Author and SJP on today show was expecting big things. Book leaves lots of unanswered questions and was confusing a lot of the time. Ending felt unfinished.
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Performance
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- Cosimo
- 09-07-23
Not so great!
Anticlimactic. No real ending. Didn’t like how the story went from one era to another. Would’ve made it easier to follow if the story was told in sequence.
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- Karen
- 06-12-23
So-so.
After hearing Jessica-Parker raving about this book in an interview, I had high expectations. Disappointing. Additionally, the sing-song narration didn't help. Beautifully written language, but that's about it. Somehow I missed the supposed deep meanings in this book.
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- Karen J.
- 06-30-23
Not great.
Couldn’t find a point to the story. Didn’t much care for the main character of the story and the narrator was not my favorite. Overall not a great read.
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- Angela Simmons
- 07-21-23
Sad cliffhanger
The ending was a sad cliffhanger that I’m not sure I want to know the ending of if I had to sit through another book to get it.
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- Bon
- 08-08-23
Dramatic narration of meandering story
The story never seemed to get anywhere or have a point. The narration was overly dramatic and slow (even at 1.2).
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- Kristine
- 05-20-24
Sad
This story left me sad and uninspired. I found myself moping around the days I read it.
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- janine
- 07-07-23
Rambling and depressing
Not what i was expecting. Rambling and depressing. I was extremely disappointed it leads nowhere except into a depressing abyss of death.
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- njqrn
- 06-08-24
Somethings missing
Reflective. At times perfect yet often a lesser version of crying in H mart. The inter generational story poignant yet familiar. Some of it very insightful while others a bit off track. Read this because of SJP yet do feel the author has potential to bloom beyond a quitters paradise.
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