
Bear
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Sophie Amoss
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By:
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Julia Phillips
About this listen
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the celebrated author of Disappearing Earth comes a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods—“a mesmerizing story about hope, sisterhood, and survival with a truly shocking twist at the end” (People, Book of the Week).
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK!
FINALIST FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Vulture, Chicago Public Library
“Thrilling and propulsive, glorious and terrifying. Julia Phillips is a brilliant writer.”—Ann Patchett
“Beautiful and haunting . . . this is brilliant.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.
Sam and Elena dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.
Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the desire to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.
A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us—and within us—Bear is a propulsive, mythical, richly imagined novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.
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Critic reviews
“Phillips smartly keeps us guessing whether the fantastical creature ultimately sees Elena as friend or feast…Bear ends with a bang, and with the intriguing notion that sisterhood (or sisters?) may be as unknowable and unpredictable as anything else in nature.”—New York Times Book Review
“Bear may remind readers of Alice Hoffman’s fantasy-flecked novels, and Phillips sprinkles around the fairy dust liberally in some sections. But she’s actually working closer to the realm of Henry James’s ‘Turn of the Screw,’ in which the central character blankets the story with her distorting anxieties.”—The Washington Post
“This mythical novel of obsession, moral reckoning, and aspiration glows with fairy tale magic.”—The Boston Globe
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Story
Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
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Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
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Little Rot
- A Novel
- By: Akwaeke Emezi
- Narrated by: Adepero Oduye, Chukwudi Iwuji
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.
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Steamy with a side of gut-wrenching
- By Rebecca Henson on 06-25-25
By: Akwaeke Emezi
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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
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The Girls Who Grew Big
- A Novel
- By: Leila Mottley
- Narrated by: AhDream Smith, Erin Spencer, Khaya Fraites
- Length: 11 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone’s red truck.
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beautiful writing!
- By Shenelle Williams on 07-07-25
By: Leila Mottley
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Happiness Falls (Good Morning America Book Club)
- A Novel
- By: Angie Kim
- Narrated by: Shannon Tyo, Sean Patrick Hopkins, Thomas Pruyn, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything—which is why she isn’t initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don’t return from a walk in a nearby park. They must have lost their phone. Or stopped for an errand somewhere. But by the time Mia’s brother runs through the front door bloody and alone, it becomes clear that the father in this tight-knit family is missing and the only witness is Eugene, who has the rare genetic condition Angelman syndrome and cannot speak.
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A mixed review, but recommend
- By Andrea B. on 09-07-23
By: Angie Kim
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Fire Exit
- By: Morgan Talty
- Narrated by: Darrell Dennis
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of Roger and Mary raising their only child, Elizabeth from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from this family and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
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Wonderful story about love, family , truth and deception and identity
- By ReallyNelie on 06-23-24
By: Morgan Talty
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Swift River
- By: Essie Chambers
- Narrated by: Shayna Small, Janina Edwards, Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It’s the summer of 1987 in Swift River, and Diamond Newberry is learning how to drive. Ever since her Pop disappeared seven years ago, she and her mother hitchhike everywhere they go. But that’s not the only reason Diamond stands out: she’s teased relentlessly about her weight, and since Pop’s been gone, she is the only Black person in all of Swift River. This summer, Ma is determined to declare Pop legally dead so that they can collect his life insurance money, get their house back from the bank, and finally move on.
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Boring
- By Foxm004 on 05-14-25
By: Essie Chambers
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It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
- By: Anne de Marcken
- Narrated by: Jessica Preddy
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.
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The manner of which this book was written
- By Vanessa on 03-31-25
By: Anne de Marcken
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Fox
- A Novel
- By: Joyce Carol Oates
- Narrated by: Max Meyers, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Kirsten Potter, and others
- Length: 25 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.
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Dazzling writing and performances
- By L. Wroten on 07-01-25
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The Book of Love
- A Novel
- By: Kelly Link
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 23 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the acclaimed first novel from short story virtuoso and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle.
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Great book.
- By T on 04-06-25
By: Kelly Link
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Colored Television
- A Novel
- By: Danzy Senna
- Narrated by: Kristen Ariza
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,” she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped.
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Frustrating
- By Carolyn White on 12-12-24
By: Danzy Senna
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Mothers and Sons
- A Novel
- By: Adam Haslett
- Narrated by: Andrew Gibson, Janet Metzger
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of immigrants only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him. Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built.
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Good multiple narrators. Tiresome characters.
- By CoastalReader on 02-20-25
By: Adam Haslett
Keep looking for another book
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Many, if not most, listeners seem to enjoy this style . I don’t.
Narration Didn’t Work For Me
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Not A Fairy Tale
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The Bear
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Long Trot Down a Single Path
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Engaging story of sisters
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Has a lot of sadness and longing. And escape at the end.
Story of survival
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Lovely writing. Dreadful Sam.
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A bit far fetched and happily ever after ending felt discordant.
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Meh.
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