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Afterlives
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Damian Lynch
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
A NEW YORKER “ESSENTIAL READ”
A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST, TIME, THE NEW YORKER, BOOKPAGE, AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Superb. . . . A celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away.”—New York Times
From the winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a sweeping, multigenerational saga of displacement, loss, and love, set against the brutal colonization of East Africa.
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of East Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back—until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya.
As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
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Critic reviews
“Superb. . . . Afterlives is a celebration of a place and time when people held onto their own ways, and basked in ordinary joys even as outside forces conspired to take them away. . . . [Gurnah] is a novelist nonpareil, a master of the art form who understands human failings in conflicts both political and intimate—and how these shortcomings create afflictions from which nations and individuals continue to suffer, needlessly, generation after generation.”—New York Times Book Review
“At once a globe-spanning epic of European colonialism and an intimate look at village life in one of the many overlooked corners of the Earth. Both parts—reclamations of history and heart—are equally revelatory. . . . Gurnah’s greatest act of love and artistry [is] his ability to gather the fragments of broken lives and create a breathtaking mosaic in print.”—The Washington Post
“An appreciation for quiet, ordinary forms of heroism runs throughout. . . . One can take away lessons and meanings from this novel, yet such things are perhaps less significant than the sheer seeming realness of the characters, whose presences Mr. Gurnah has faithfully crafted into existence, with all of their dreaming, their sorrow and their resilience.”—Wall Street Journal
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- Narrated by: Emma Powell
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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On the brink of a life-changing decision, Alexis Fielding plans a trip to her mother's childhood home in Plaka, Greece hoping to unravel Sofia's hidden past. Given a letter to take to Sofia's old friend, Fotini, Alexis is promised that through Fotini, she will learn more. Arriving in Plaka, Alexis is astonished to see that it lies a stone's throw from the deserted island of Spinalonga—Greece's former leper colony. Fotini reveals the story that Sofia has buried all her life: the tale of her great-grandmother Eleni and her daughters, and a family rent by tragedy, war, and passion.
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Will listen to it again someday
- By RN on 01-07-23
By: Victoria Hislop
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Green City in the Sun
- By: Barbara Wood
- Narrated by: Edie Tusor
- Length: 27 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In 1917 Dr. Grace Treverton arrives in Kenya determined to bring modern medicine to the African natives. Her brother, Sir Valentine Treverton, has his own dream for the British protectorate: to establish an agricultural empire to rival any in England. The aspirations of the wealthy Trevertons collide with those of the Mathenge tribe, an African family that has lived on the land for years. Grace soon finds a deadly rival in Mama Wachera, an African medicine woman who fights to maintain native traditions against the encroaching whites.
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Beautifully written
- By nancy wanty on 12-18-23
By: Barbara Wood
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Dreamers of the Day
- A Novel
- By: Mary Doria Russell
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A 40-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as an historic Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinions - and a small, noisy dachshund named Rosie - enters into the company of the historic luminaries.
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Little Big Woman
- By W.Denis on 10-02-08
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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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Mosaic
- By: Diane Armstrong
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 19 hrs and 56 mins
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>i>Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best - from the fascinating details of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary true story of a family, and of one woman's journey to reclaim her heritage.
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Absolutely excellent!
- By Roberta on 09-22-11
By: Diane Armstrong
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Tears of the Desert
- A Memoir of Survival in Darfur
- By: Halima Bashir, Damien Lewis
- Narrated by: Rosalyn Landor
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Halima Bashir was born into the Zaghawa tribe, whose customs have remained unchanged for centuries, in the remote western deserts of Sudan in the region of South Darfur. Halima's father named his daughter after the traditional medicine woman of the village, and she grew up in a happy and close-knit childhood environment. Her father became a wealthy man by his tribe's standards, so he could afford to send Halima to school and university. Halima went on to study medicine, and at 24 she returned to her tribe and began practicing as their first ever qualified doctor.
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A story that takes you there
- By Justicepirate on 05-22-17
By: Halima Bashir, and others
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Find Me Unafraid
- Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum
- By: Kennedy Odede, Jessica Posner
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson, Mandy Siegfried, P.J. Ochlan (foreword)
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.
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A difficult and rewarding listen
- By R. MCRACKAN on 08-23-18
By: Kennedy Odede, and others
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Slave
- By: Mende Nazar, Damien Lewis
- Narrated by: Adjoa Andoh
- Length: 10 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Mende Nazer tells the story of her kidnap, at age 12, from an idyllic life with her family in a village in Sudan, and being sold into slavery. Trafficked to Europe and the London home of a diplomat, Nazer escaped - only to find she had to fight for asylum.
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Heartbreaking dose of reality
- By Sarah on 09-02-09
By: Mende Nazar, and others
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After the Roundup
- Escape and Survival in Hitler’s France
- By: Joseph Weismann
- Narrated by: J. Clark Allison
- Length: 5 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
On the nights of July 16 and 17, 1942, French police rounded up 11-year-old Joseph Weismann, his family, and 13,000 other Jews. After being held for five days in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, Joseph and his family were transported by cattle car to the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp and brutally separated. A thousand children were left behind to wait for a later train. The French guards told the children that they would soon be reunited with their parents, but Joseph and his new friend, Joe Kogan, chose to risk everything in a daring escape attempt.
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A “must-listen” book
- By Jonathan R Scupin on 09-25-18
By: Joseph Weismann
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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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Story
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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Story of a Secret State
- Penguin Modern Classics
- By: Jan Karski
- Narrated by: Janusz Guttner
- Length: 18 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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I do not pretend to have given an exhaustive picture of the Polish Underground, its organisation and its activities. Because of our methods, I believe that there is no one today who could give an all-embracing recital...This book is a purely personal story, my story. Jan Karski's Second World War memoir is a heroic act of witness: the courageous testimony of a man who risked everything for his country. First published in 1944, the book became an instant bestseller in the US while the war still raged in Europe.
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Outstanding
- By David on 10-20-11
By: Jan Karski
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Shadow of a Century
- By: Jean Grainger
- Narrated by: Alana Kerr Collins
- Length: 11 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Mary Doyle arrives in Dublin in 1913, doomed, she fears, to a life of domestic service. Instead, however, she finds herself deeply affected by the social and political turmoil of a fledgling nation struggling for independence. Suddenly, all that was once inevitable is no longer a certainty as she is embroiled in the very heart of the Easter Rising.
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Loved this book!
- By Amazon Customer on 11-14-20
By: Jean Grainger
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Dreams from My Father
- A Story of Race and Inheritance
- By: Barack Obama
- Narrated by: Barack Obama
- Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a Black African father and a White American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a Black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family.
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Powerful
- By Gene R. on 10-26-21
By: Barack Obama
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A House for Mr. Biswas
- By: V. S. Naipaul
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 21 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A House for Mr. Biswas, by Nobel and Booker Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul, is a powerful novel about one man's struggle for identity and belonging. Born into poverty, then trapped in the shackles of charity and gratitude, Mr. Biswas longs for a house he can call his own. He loathes his wife and her wealthy family, upon whom he is dependent. Finding himself a mere accessory on their estate, his constant rebellion is motivated by the one thing that can symbolize his independence.
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Performance makes a fatal mistake. No Trini accent
- By Christopher on 01-04-19
By: V. S. Naipaul
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Over a decade ago, Groff moved to her adopted home state of Florida. The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center. Storms, snakes, and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats and mysteries are of a human, emotional, and psychological nature. Groff's evocative storytelling and knife-sharp intelligence first transport the listener, then jolt us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty....
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The “best short story writer in English” (Time) is back with a masterful collection that explores ideas of power, ethics, and justice, and cuts to the very heart of what it means to live in community with our fellow humans. With his trademark prose—wickedly funny, unsentimental, and perfectly tuned—Saunders continues to challenge and surprise: here is a collection of prismatic, deeply resonant stories that encompass joy and despair, oppression and revolution, bizarre fantasy and brutal reality.
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What listeners say about Afterlives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Uncle Techy
- 09-22-22
Enlightening
Bittersweet ending. interesting confluence of German Army officers and African recruits.
An excellent listen
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- Maturin
- 01-11-23
Very Disappointing Despite the Hype
Too much minutia, not enough insight. Nothing new about colonial ravages in Africa. A long slog to reach a ho-hum conclusion.
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- Paul in Tucson
- 10-05-23
Enlightening portrayal
What I most liked about this story is that it prompted me to unpack the outrageous audacity of the European powers at the beginning of the 20th century. Every part of Africa was claimed by one of 7 or 8 nations by 1914. The story was about the impact of German occupation of east Africa (now Tanzania) which forced young African men to serve in their wars of dominance. The story is told from the view of common villagers who had to manage their own trauma and carve out their own lives. Very appealing characters and some less so. Readers will recognize them from their own lives.
It would have helped to have key names spelled out for reference while reading.
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- GMO
- 03-08-23
Great story, abrupt and unsatisfying ending
So many good images and narratives of colonial East Africa, and certainly the not much illustrated German Ost-Africa (at least in English). Having lived on the coast of southern Kenya, I could visualize and imagine the landscape and village stories. The ending was incredibly abrupt and unsatisfying. It’s as if 20 years were summarized in a few pages and then that was that!
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- JPI
- 04-23-23
Disappointing
This was my first book by this author - terse style and a story that feels incomplete and poorly edited. I am rather mystified by the acclaim this book received.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-18-23
Great story
I really enjoyed this book. I have something to say to each characters. Narrator is extremely excellent. Thanks to everyone behind this project.
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- Joe Shely
- 04-25-23
Much more entertaining than a history book
Go into this with the perspective of learning the history of Tanzania and the surrounding region through the lives of regular people and you won’t be disappointed.
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- Andrew J. Winnegar
- 11-30-22
Great history and great Reader
Enjoyed the reader and the story Simple but historical The history of Africa and the colony governments
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- Christiane Hepfer
- 12-20-22
Interesting Topic
You rarely hear a story that plays in East Africa. The author, however, is obviously inexperienced. He starts with one character in great detail, switches over to another in great detail, 2/3 through the book he loses steam and wraps everything up in a few pages. Not very satisfactory.
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- sarah f.
- 10-12-22
Remarkanble history
The history revealed filled gaps in my knowledge of African.
Some characterizations were minimal and were of less importance than the thread of the story. Plot was simple also. The strength of the novel was in seeing the affect the long history had on main characters and how they coped with German and British rule. The story showed the contrast between the European's dispraging view of African people and the reality of the competence of African's and the success of the African civilizations.
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1 person found this helpful