
Anything Is Possible
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Kimberly Farr
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By:
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Elizabeth Strout
About this listen
An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss in this new work of fiction by number one best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout.
Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others.
Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times best seller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.
Reverberating with the deep bonds of family and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors.
©2017 Elizabeth Strout (P)2017 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Editorial reviews
Editors Select, April 2017 - I've never read anything by Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, not Olive Kitteridge, not My Name Is Lucy Barton, nothing. This is a mistake I plan to soon rectify after listening to Anything Is Possible. Strout delivers a distinct and down-to-earth vision of American life with a patchwork of exactingly crafted characters. Each is so normal and somewhat unassuming but also tortured and robust. She seems to know exactly how to pinpoint the pain that drives people, and each of the stories that make up this novel comes to a carefully balanced yet captivating crescendo. But what I love most about this book is Strout's measured sense of voice. Not only does it complement her understated characters, and not only is it the ideal vehicle for narrator Kimberly Farr, but it is perfectly suited to the quick turns of emotion and introspection that make these stories so brilliantly moving and memorable. Michael, Audible Editor
Critic reviews
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Story
In the late 1950s, in a small New England town, Reverend Tyler Caskey has suffered a terrible loss and finds it hard to be the person he once was. He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family’s tragedy. Tyler’s usually patient and kind congregation now questions his leadership and propriety, and accusations are born out of anger and gossip.
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Her insights into humanity are deep in remarkable
- By Monte on 07-22-24
By: Elizabeth Strout
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A Spool of Blue Thread
- A Novel
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 13 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon..." This is how Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The Whitshanks are one of those families that radiate togetherness: an indefinable, enviable kind of specialness. But they are also like all families, in that the stories they tell themselves reveal only part of the picture.
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The Sharp Edge Of Family
- By Sara on 03-10-15
By: Anne Tyler
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French Braid
- A Novel
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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The Garretts take their first and last family vacation in the summer of 1959. They hardly ever leave home, but in some ways they have never been farther apart. Mercy has trouble resisting the siren call of her aspirations to be a painter, which means less time keeping house for her husband, Robin. Their teenage daughters, steady Alice and boy-crazy Lily, could not have less in common.
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Definitely not my favorite
- By 80 Oaks on 03-31-22
By: Anne Tyler
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Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Rodgers
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not of her memory. It was a Sunday night in 1944 when her husband left the little row house on Baltimore's Calvert Street, abandoning Pearl to raise their three children alone: Jenny, high-spirited and determined, nurturing to strangers but distant to those she loves; the older son, Cody, a wild and incorrigible youth possessed by the lure of power and money; and sweet, clumsy Ezra, Pearl's favorite, who never stops yearning for the perfect family that could never be his own. Now Pearl and her three grown children have gathered....
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Classic Anne Tyler
- By Eve Harris on 09-14-21
By: Anne Tyler
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Housekeeping
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Becket Royce
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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A modern classic, Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone, set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death.
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errancy, abandonment, and madness
- By Emily on 07-19-11
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These Precious Days
- Essays
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Ann Patchett
- Length: 11 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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“Any story that starts will also end.” As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart.
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Heartfelt Essays, Beautifully Performed
- By Brent Holcomb on 11-23-21
By: Ann Patchett
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Dream State
- A Novel
- By: Eric Puchner
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 13 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a medical student with a brilliant future. Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, though Cece can’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the task; Garrett doesn’t believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with Garrett, and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, her feelings for Garrett—haunted by a tragic event from his past—become impossible to bury.
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An Enthralling Listen
- By Regina on 02-20-25
By: Eric Puchner
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Redhead by the Side of the Road
- A Novel
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: MacLeod Andrews
- Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Micah Mortimer is a creature of habit. A self-employed tech expert, superintendent of his Baltimore apartment building, cautious to a fault behind the steering wheel, he seems content leading a steady, circumscribed life. But one day, his routines are blown apart when his woman friend (he refuses to call anyone in her late 30s a "girlfriend") tells him she's facing eviction, and a teenager shows up at Micah's door claiming to be his son. These surprises, and the ways they throw Micah's meticulously organized life off-kilter, risk changing him forever.
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Disappointed Diehard Tyler Fan
- By Suze on 04-13-20
By: Anne Tyler
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Familiaris
- By: David Wroblewski
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 37 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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It is spring 1919, and John Sawtelle’s imagination has gotten him into trouble … again. Now John and his newlywed wife, Mary, along with their two best friends and their three dogs, are setting off for Wisconsin’s northwoods, where they hope to make a fresh start—and, with a little luck, discover what it takes to live a life of meaning, purpose and adventure. But the place they are headed for is far stranger and more perilous than they realize, and it will take all their ingenuity, along with a few new friends—human, animal, and otherworldly—to realize their dreams.
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A great story!
- By gypsietraveler on 10-25-24
By: David Wroblewski
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Nesting
- A Novel
- By: Roisín O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Louisa Harland
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On a bright spring afternoon, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, she straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe—and that this time, when she leaves, she must stay away. On the surface, she has a perfect life: her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, sometimes even kind and attentive, from a nice Irish family, and they have another baby on the way.
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Jarring narration at times
- By Anonymous User on 04-04-25
By: Roisín O'Donnell
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Three Days in June
- A Novel
- By: Anne Tyler
- Narrated by: J. Smith-Cameron
- Length: 4 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit. But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.
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Simple, Enjoyable, performed 5 stars
- By PM on 02-14-25
By: Anne Tyler
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The Patron Saint of Liars
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Julia Gibson
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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St. Elizabeth’s, a home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky, usually harbors its residents for only a little while. Not so Rose Clinton, a beautiful, mysterious woman who comes to the home pregnant but not unwed, and stays. She plans to give up her child, thinking she cannot be the mother it needs. But when Cecilia is born, Rose makes a place for herself and her daughter amid St. Elizabeth’s extended family of nuns and an ever-changing collection of pregnant teenage girls.
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Incomplete
- By Deborah on 04-24-08
By: Ann Patchett
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The Museum of Failures
- By: Thrity Umrigar
- Narrated by: Vikas Adam
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Remy Wadia left India for the United States long ago, carrying his resentment of his mother with him. He has now returned to Bombay to adopt a baby from a young pregnant girl—and to see his elderly mother for the first time in several years. Discovering that his mother is in the hospital, has stopped talking, and seems to have given up on life, he is struck with guilt for not realizing just how sick she has become.
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I loved this story...until I didn't...
- By R Cravey on 11-24-23
By: Thrity Umrigar
Elizabeth Stroud is wonderful!
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And then, I learned what Lucy Barton was preparing me for. The women, and some sensitive men, of Amgash, Illinois come to life in these loosely woven stories. They are flawed, doubting, hoping, and often (but not always) redeemed. Strout believes in the ripple effects of a benevolent gaze, but she is not shallow or trite in demonstrating this.
This is a quiet book for a rainy afternoon or for recovering from something that has exhausted the spirit. It is suitable for reading after the midterm election is over--whether your side won or lost, Strout's stories of small town life will remind you of how, and why, to repair the fragile threads that make a family or community. It's not an adventure story or a who-dunnit. It's not a Pollyanna story of good people doing good deeds and saving the world. But it is believable, and there is grace in these people.
Strout captures the rural Illinois that I know--the sweltering heat of summer, the knife-edge fragility of a family farm, the easy cruelty of tiny town gossip, the equally easy generosity of neighbors, the stands of oak, the endless miles of genetically-engineered corn and soybeans, the resistance to change and the inevitable inroads that it makes in our lives, anyway. There are shafts of light amidst the dark green overgrowth that lines footpaths in town that has outlasted its economic reason to exist. My heart wants to go there, too, to rest only slightly uneasy while fireflies dance quietly in the grass.
This book is the reason to read Lucy Barton
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Strait dies such a great job of creating a community...
Interesting group of people to spend time with
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It was so good, I’d like to listen to it all over again!
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Excellent book.
Elizabeth Strout is a national treasure
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This is the story about a town you won't remember and it's people who you can't forget. Strout's writing style seems as simple as her character's lives that she colors in chapter- by- chapter.
The reader becomes fully invested in these small town people who connect in beautifully written "slices of life."
Outstanding ending. A great piece of literature.
My favorite read so far in 2017.
Best Read of Winter/Spring 2017
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The Scars and Sweetness of Life
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A Perfect Match of Narrator to Book.
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LUCY BARTON by the same author
which makes this next book more enjoyable,
but it definitely is not essential.
Elizabeth Strout has superb language
skills.
Best writing ever. Best story ever
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Ms. Strout is an amazing storyteller!
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