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A Son of the Circus
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 26 hrs and 50 mins
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Publisher's summary
Once, 20 years ago, Dr. Daruwalla was the examining physician of two murder victims in Goa. Now, 20 years later, he will be reacquainted with the murderer.
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In "Books and Roses", one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers' fates. In "Is Your Blood as Red as This?", an unlikely key opens the heart of a student at a puppeteering school. "'Sorry' Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea" involves a "house of locks", where doors can be closed only with a key - with surprising unobservable developments. And in "If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think", a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason).
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clever
- By jared rogerson on 03-15-18
By: Helen Oyeyemi
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Lolita
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
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An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
- By Jim on 10-26-05
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Fury
- By: Salman Rushdie
- Narrated by: Salman Rushdie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The world renowned author of The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Salman Rushdie is a Whitbread Award winner and recipient of the Booker Prize. His first truly American novel, Fury is a metaphorically rich black comedy that reflects the pressure-cooker of modern life. Malik Solanka, irascible doll-maker and retired historian of ideas, suffers the pain of wanting without knowing exactly what it is he wants.
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surprisingly good
- By David on 11-21-07
By: Salman Rushdie
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Millard Salter's Last Day
- By: Jacob M. Appel
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In an effort to delay the frailty and isolation that comes with old age, psychiatrist Millard Salter decides to kill himself by the end of the day - but first he has to tie up some loose ends. These include a tête-à-tête with his youngest son, Lysander, who at 43 has yet to hold down a paying job; an unscheduled rendezvous with his first wife, Carol, whom he hasn't seen in 27 years; and a brief visit to the grave of his second wife, Isabelle. Complicating this plan, though, is Delilah, the widow with whom he has fallen in love in the past few months.
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great storytelling....
- By Anna Marie Bair on 01-18-20
By: Jacob M. Appel
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Before We Visit the Goddess
- By: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Priya Ayyar, Vikas Adam
- Length: 7 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing, but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single unforgivable misstep. Years later, Sabitri's own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.
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Absolutely Worth a Credit
- By Texastanya on 08-27-16
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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Driving on the Rim
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
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Delightful
- By Roy on 01-05-11
By: Thomas McGuane
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The Association of Small Bombs
- By: Karan Mahajan
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family's television at a repair shop with their friend, Mansoor Ahmed, one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb - one of the many "small" bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world - detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb.
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A tragedy of manners
- By jdukuray on 07-22-16
By: Karan Mahajan
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WELL..... I LOVED IT
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Unabridged?
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TMI
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Didn't get past intro
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Should have a XX rating for sex including incest.
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Outstanding
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Great Story...but then there was the narration
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Frederick Fife was born with an extra helping of kindness in his heart. If he borrowed your car, he’d return it washed with a full tank of gas. The problem is there’s nobody left in Fred’s life to borrow from. At eighty-two, he’s desperately lonely, broke, and on the brink of homelessness. But Fred’s luck changes when, in a bizarre case of mistaken identity, he takes the place of grumpy Bernard Greer at the local nursing home. Now he has warm meals in his belly and a roof over his head—as long as his poker face is in better shape than his prostate and that his look-alike never turns up.
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Beautiful Story
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This spellbinding novel by bestselling author Ann Napolitano is a poignant reminder of how connected we are to those we love, even when we cannot find the words to say it. The unforgettable story of three generations of an Irish American family, Within Arm’s Reach is another rich and deeply satisfying novel from the author who captured the many dimensions of grief in Dear Edward and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood in Hello Beautiful.
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Louis was the only character I liked.
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Shelterwood
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Oklahoma, 1909. Eleven-year-old Olive Augusta Radley knows that her stepfather doesn’t have good intentions toward the two Choctaw girls boarded in their home as wards. When the older girl disappears, Ollie flees to the woods, taking six-year-old Nessa with her. Together they begin a perilous journey to the remote Winding Stair Mountains, the notorious territory of outlaws, treasure hunters, and desperate men. Along the way, Ollie and Nessa form an unlikely band with others like themselves, struggling to stay one step ahead of those who seek to exploit them . . . or worse.
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Loved it!!
- By Iread on 07-28-24
By: Lisa Wingate
What listeners say about A Son of the Circus
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Gert
- 02-10-10
Long tedious book
After reading A Prayer for Owen Meany I had expectations..... but alas, nowhere close. In it's own right a good story. But way to long. at one stage hoped that the various bad guys and "girls" will just die or get caught so that I dont have to read about them any longer.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Fred
- 07-08-24
Okay but overly long
To say I loved this book would be a lie. To say it was too long is not a lie.
I did like the characters in this book and liked the story to a pint BUT I think it could be edited down to half it's length.
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Overall
- connie
- 01-15-09
If you liked "Q+A"...
...you might like this bizarre tale of family, community, hierarchy, missionaries, twins separated at birth, and transexual serial murder in India. Unlike Q+A's Vikras Swarup, Irving isn't Indian, but he avoids cultural appropriation (I think--I'm not Indian) by stating upfront in the intro that he doesn't know India well, thanking a host of South East Asian artists for their help, and creating an ex-pat main character who is alientated from his birth country but not assimilated into the West.
I found the novel humourous and tremendously entertaining, but it's not for everyone: Know that there are multiple quirkly characters weaving through several intersecting storylines highly dependent upon coincidence, like a modern day tale from Trollope or Dickens with a twist of PG Wodehouse's mania, all held together by excellent narration.
Irving asks, in a postcolonial global village, "where are you from?" rather than the usual, "who are you?", and the only viable attitude he offers to complexities of human nature is that of a child's wonderment at a circus, despite the probability that the acts are based on cruelty to participants. The opposite of such wonder is fundamentalism. Many characters are shackled by fate, but a few escape predictable ends through human imagination or altruism.
Irving presents an unflattering but loving portrait of Bombay/Mumbai in the late 80s, before the terrorist bombings of 1993 and economic boom of 2000s. I'm not sure how an inhabitant would respond to the outsider's view. Also I'm not sure how a transexual might react to some of the characters. Some also might be put off by the novel's use of "cripple"/"crippled" to describe what we refer to now as disability, but all the charaters are "crippled," if not physically than emotionally or socially.
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38 people found this helpful
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- Kindle Customer
- 05-18-13
Typical Irving
John Irving it seems will alway pick on women, almost women, and children. You will not be disappointed. Again, he is the master of finding something funny in human suffering. His description is so rich you can almost smell the the surroundings.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 01-20-18
Great book
The ideas he explores are profound:belonging, fate, fantasy or reality. My girlfriend has been telling me for years to read this book and I'm so glad I did.
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- Justin
- 11-03-16
I am being loving it.
This is my second time through this enjoyable journey. It's a long and frolicking story with mystery, humour and many kinds of love.
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- joey carbo
- 05-19-22
Not a one time read
The shifts in time, multiple names for characters, and constant shifting can make it hard to follow. I think Irving was trying to NOT write like himself, to mixed result. It has the potential for a really great murder mystery, better than most and unpredictable, but not in one reading.
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Overall
- nancy campione
- 09-07-08
Irving's Best Since Garp
I'm an Irving fan, and haven't enjoyed his work this much since Garp. Unlikely characters in strange circumstances, and it all works wonderfully. I laughed out loud, very unusual for me, and was hooked on characters I initially thought would be hard to like. Excellent narration, long book but worth it.
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23 people found this helpful
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Overall
- James
- 08-03-08
A Long Trip
I liked this book a lot but by hour 15 you'll wonder if this will ever end. Just go with the long diversions and back stories, the language and the great reader. You'll be through it in no time!
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11 people found this helpful
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- Kathryn S
- 04-04-18
Masterful Writing But...
First I’ve read of this author. I just am not a fan of perversion, gender dysphoria, ambiguous sexuality, and murder as such focal points of plot. Maybe ‘circus’ of life and its misfits rather than anything much about actual circus, except the dwarf cab driver. Note to author: concentrate on character development.
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