
Afterlives
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Damian Lynch
About this listen
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.
©2020 Abdulrazak Gurnah (P)2022 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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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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Story
Poverty and depravity wreak havoc on Hassan Omar’s family. Amid great hardship he decides to escape. The arrival of independence brings new upheavals as well as the betrayal of the promise of freedom. The new government, fearful of an exodus of its most able men, discourages young people from travelling abroad and refuses to release examination results. Deprived of a scholarship, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother’s rightful share of the family inheritance.
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#readrazakchallenge
- By Jeanette Karimi on 01-16-23
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Dottie
- By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Narrated by: Isabel Adomakoh Young
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour finds solace amidst the squalor of her childhood by spinning warm tales of affection about her beautiful names. But she knows nothing of their origins, and little of her family history—or the abuse her ancestors suffered as they made their home in Britain. At seventeen, she takes on the burden of responsibility for her brother and sister and is obsessed with keeping the family together. However, as Sophie, lumpen yet voluptuous, drifts away, and the confused Hudson is absorbed into the world of crime, Dottie is forced to consider her own needs.
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Chilean Poet
- A Novel
- By: Alejandro Zambra, Megan McDowell - translator
- Narrated by: Gisela Chipe
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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After a chance encounter at a Santiago nightclub, aspiring poet Gonzalo reunites with his first love, Carla. Though their desire for each other is still intact, much has changed: among other things, Carla now has a six-year-old son, Vicente. Soon the three form a happy sort-of family—a stepfamily, though no such word exists in their language. Eventually, their ambitions pull the lovers in different directions—in Gonzalo’s case, all the way to New York. Though Gonzalo takes his books when he goes, still, Vicente inherits his ex-stepfather’s love of poetry.
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Interesting but not my cup of tea .
- By Liz Gorr on 07-21-22
By: Alejandro Zambra, and others
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The Last Gift
- By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Narrated by: Ali Zayn
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Abbas has never told anyone about his past—before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.
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A Depressing Story About Nothing
- By X on 11-09-23
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The Rabbit Hutch
- A Novel
- By: Tess Gunty
- Narrated by: Tess Gunty, Scott Brick, Suzanne Toren, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building. An online obituary writer. A young mother with a dark secret. A woman waging a solo campaign against rodents — neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex in the once bustling industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.
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when will we stop romanticizing pedophilia
- By Kindle Customer on 08-18-22
By: Tess Gunty
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The Years
- By: Annie Ernaux
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present - even projections into the future - photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges.
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Mixed Feelings
- By Elin VanD on 05-10-20
By: Annie Ernaux
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The Maniac
- By: Benjamin Labatut
- Narrated by: Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar
- Length: 9 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
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Gergo Danka and Eva Magyar are excellent narrators
- By Barbara S on 11-04-23
By: Benjamin Labatut
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Whale Fall
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth O'Connor
- Narrated by: Dyfrig Morris, Gabrielle Glaister, Gwyneth Keyworth, and others
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful yet blisteringly harsh islands that her hardscrabble family has called home for generations.
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Excellent book for audible
- By Lilly on 01-01-25
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The School for Good Mothers
- A Novel
- By: Jessamine Chan
- Narrated by: Catherine Ho
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Frida Liu is struggling. She doesn’t have a career worthy of her Chinese immigrant parents’ sacrifices. She can’t persuade her husband, Gust, to give up his wellness-obsessed younger mistress. Only with Harriet, their cherubic daughter, does Frida finally attain the perfection expected of her. Harriet may be all she has, but she is just enough.
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What in the world?
- By Love2Read on 01-11-22
By: Jessamine Chan
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There Are Rivers in the Sky
- A Novel
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Olivia Vinall, Elif Shafak
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives. In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory.
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I am 81 years old. Profoundly moved from this book. Plan to get my first tattoo.
- By mary e hennessy on 10-21-24
By: Elif Shafak
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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
- In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life
- By: George Saunders
- Narrated by: George Saunders, Phylicia Rashad, Nick Offerman, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times.
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An innovative and fresh listening experience
- By Scott Garrioch on 01-14-21
By: George Saunders
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We Do Not Part
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.
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Powerful, Tough Listen
- By ncnickle on 01-26-25
By: Han Kang, and others
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Cloud Cuckoo Land
- A Novel
- By: Anthony Doerr
- Narrated by: Marin Ireland, Simon Jones
- Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Among the most celebrated and beloved novels of 2021, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.
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Academic Snobbery
- By TVR on 10-03-21
By: Anthony Doerr
What listeners say about Afterlives
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Reviews - 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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- 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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- 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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- 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