Beneath the Lion's Gaze
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Steven Crossley
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By:
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Maaza Mengiste
About this listen
This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother's prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country. His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu's youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement---a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.
Beneath the Lion's Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction before. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion's Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.
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It is Warsaw, 1939, and Elzunia is an indulged teenager who longs for a heroic life filled with romance. But the outbreak of war shatters all her dreams. As bombs fall, she meets Adam, a taciturn airman whose fate becomes entwined with hers. In despair over the occupation, Adam joins the Polish resistance, then flies bombers for the RAF.
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Blech
- By Caroline H. on 02-20-11
By: Diane Armstrong
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Hum If You Don't Know the Words
- By: Bianca Marais
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.
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Completely wrong accents
- By Debbie on 02-12-22
By: Bianca Marais
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Sugar
- By: Bernice L. McFadden
- Narrated by: Myra Lucretia Taylor
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Sugar arrives in the small town of Bigelow, Arkansas, like an ominous storm. She saunters down the street in a blonde wig and spiked heels, cigarette dangling between red-painted lips. Without even speaking to her, the women in town hate her. But when she moves in next door to Pearl, a woman who tragically lost her daughter 15 years earlier, the two women bond over tragic pasts.
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Wow wow wow
- By brenda transon on 08-27-19
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Leopard at the Door
- By: Jennifer McVeigh
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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After six years in England, Rachel has returned to Kenya and the farm where she spent her childhood, but the beloved home she'd longed for is much changed. Her father's new companion - a strange, intolerant woman - has taken over the household. The political climate in the country grows more unsettled by the day and is approaching the boiling point. And looming over them all is the threat of the Mau Mau, a secret society intent on uniting the native Kenyans and overthrowing the whites.
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IMPERIALISM
- By Haberwoman on 08-02-18
By: Jennifer McVeigh
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Fruit of the Drunken Tree
- A Novel
- By: Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Narrated by: Marisol Ramirez, Almarie Guerra, Ingrid Rojas Contreras
- Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister, Cassandra, enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation. When their mother hires Petrona, a live-in-maid from the city's guerrilla-occupied slum, Chula makes it her mission to understand Petrona's mysterious ways.
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Maybe better to read this book than listen???
- By Amazon Customer on 12-12-18
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The Feed
- A Novel
- By: Nick Clark Windo
- Narrated by: Clare Corbett, Nick Clark Windo
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Feed is accessible everywhere, by everyone, at any time. It instantaneously links us to all information and global events. Tom and Kate use the Feed, but Tom has resisted its addiction. The Feed's collapse, taking modern society with it, leaves people scavenging to survive. Tom and Kate have managed to protect themselves and their family. But then their six-year-old daughter, Bea, goes missing. Who has taken her? How do you begin to look for someone in a world without technology?
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uhhh
- By Michelle on 03-10-20
By: Nick Clark Windo
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The Jewel
- By: Amy Ewing
- Narrated by: Erin Spencer
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Violet, born and raised in the Marsh, has been trained as a surrogate for the royalty - because in the Jewel the only thing more important than opulence is offspring. Purchased at the surrogacy auction by the Duchess of the Lake and greeted with a slap to the face, Violet (now known only as #197) quickly learns of the brutal truths that lie beneath the Jewel's glittering facade.
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Left Me Feeling Annoyed
- By Carol Dunn on 11-04-15
By: Amy Ewing
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When the Moon Is Low
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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The Queen of the Tearling
- A Novel
- By: Erika Johansen
- Narrated by: Katherine Kellgren
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Magic, adventure, mystery, and romance combine in this epic debut in which a young princess must reclaim her dead mother’s throne, learn to be a ruler - and defeat the Red Queen, a powerful and malevolent sorceress determined to destroy her. On her 19th birthday, Princess Kelsea Raleigh Glynn, raised in exile, sets out on a perilous journey back to the castle of her birth to ascend her rightful throne. Plain and serious, a girl who loves books and learning, Kelsea bears little resemblance to her mother, the vain and frivolous Queen Elyssa.
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Volume changed a lot
- By Nik on 12-20-14
By: Erika Johansen
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The Betrayal
- By: Kate Furnivall
- Narrated by: Imogen Church
- Length: 12 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Could you kill someone? Someone you love? Paris, 1938. This is the story of twin sisters divided by fierce loyalties and by a terrible secret. The drums of war are beating, and France is poised, ready to fall. One sister is an aviatrix, the other is a socialite, and they both have something to prove and something to hide. Discover a brilliant story of love, danger, courage...and betrayal.
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Disappointment
- By Cathey Johnson on 04-14-19
By: Kate Furnivall
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The Ghosts of Belfast
- By: Stuart Neville
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 11 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Fegan has been a "hard man" - an IRA killer in Northern Ireland. Now that peace has come, he is being haunted day and night by 12 ghosts: a mother and infant, a schoolboy, a butcher, an RUC constable, and seven other of his innocent victims. In order to appease them, he's going to have to kill the men who gave him orders. As he's working his way down the list, he encounters a woman who may offer him redemption; she has borne a child to an RUC officer and is an outsider too.
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don't judge by its cover
- By connie on 01-05-13
By: Stuart Neville
What listeners say about Beneath the Lion's Gaze
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Robert
- 03-25-12
Not an easy read
Relevant to present-day Africa and the Middle East, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a powerful book that was not easy for me to read. The descriptions of events within the novel were brutal, horrifyingly violent and disturbing vivid. Maaza Mengiste fictionalizes the reality of the last days of Emperor Haile Selassie's despotic rule of Ethiopia and the beginning of the Derg reign of terror following his overthrow. While not easy to read because of its heartbreaking tales of torture and death, the story and suspense was generally quite riveting because it was so excellently written.
The prose was often poetic in its descriptions that sometimes lifted you up in its lyricism and then threw you to the ground with the horror of the events depicted. I am thinking particularly of a scene where one of the monsters of the book, “the colonel,” commits suicide. While perhaps we cheered that the villain was dead, we were jolted by the sudden surprise within the description of the act and the realism of the complexity of the character who acted so abominably out of his own love and loss.
This is a story of contrasts: It is about loyalty and betrayal, power and powerlessness, action and passivity. And, while belief in god is often questioned, there are never any satisfying answers. Why did merciful and compassionate god cause these innocent people to experience the horrors they were forced to endure. How could a doctor whose raison d'etre was saving lives commit euthanasia on a young girl.
Mengiste’s characters are richly described, believable and completely compelling of us to care about each of them. The author has they and we the readers probably wondering if what these people had before was really worse than the aftermath of what overthrew their leaders, the Derg. The horror is mind-boggling. I read this book because it was a selection for a book club.
However, it reminded me of the periods and places in history I have stopped reading about because to the pure personal agony that I felt while reading. For me, though, this was more than just another book. It was an experience that will stay with me for some time to come.
Most of the characters in the book had some kind of religious belief and throughout they question why what is happening to them. In the end, I think that the resolution and reconciliation of the people experiencing this terrible time is summed up in one unbelievable sentence:
“When you are convinced that everything that happens is the will of God, what is there to do but wait until God has mercy?”
They had much more belief than I.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Janet M. Sorrentino
- 08-01-18
profound narrative beautifully written
The pace, the human drama integrated with the political upheaval, made this a clear window to the Ethiopian revolution.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Wondwosen
- 05-01-19
great story telling
well written story by Maaza.
my only comment on the reader is if the he knew the local words..he mispronounced some of them. otherwise well read!
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- Marty
- 10-15-19
Authentic
I liked that the novel seemed so authentic with great visuals. You rooted for the family to survive and you empathized with their decisions. I also thought the narrator was excellent.
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- Mary Madsen
- 09-03-23
This story is base on a terrible time in Ethiopia
It is a story of courage and violence. Very hard emotionless to listen to. The story emphasizes that what. We think and do makes an important difference.
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- Mikematic
- 07-06-22
Should be fiction not historical fiction
I stopped reading half way through because there was a lot of historically inconsistency and didn’t think the author has done an in-depth research into Ethiopian history. When I got to the part that the emperor was killed by suffocating him with a pillow, a common myth and urban legend that has been debunked long ago. One reads historical novels to try and imagine life and events during that period. The best historical novels tell us accurate histories sometimes weaves into a beautiful plot. This one falls far short from that.
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1 person found this helpful