Bring Up the Bodies
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Ben Miles
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By:
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Hilary Mantel
About this listen
2012 Washington Post Best Books of the Year
2012 Cleveland Plain Dealer's Best Books of the Year
2012 NPR Best Book of the Year
2012 Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year
2012 USA Today Best Books of the Year
2012 New Yorker Best Books of the Year
2012 Entertainment Weekly Best Books of the Year
2013 Women's Prize for Fiction - Shortlist
2012 Costa Book Award - Winner
2012 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
2012 Man Booker Award - Winner
2012 Time Magazine Top 10 Books of the Year
2012 The Independent (UK) Best Books of the Year
2013 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Shortlist
2012 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
2013 Audie Award Winner
2012 Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
This program is read by Ben Miles, who played Thomas Cromwell in the Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.
Winner of the 2012 Man Booker Prize
The sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times best seller, Bring Up the Bodies delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn.
Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son, and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice.
At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Anne's head?
Bring Up the Bodies is one of The New York Times' 10 Best Books of 2012, one of Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Best Books of 2012, and one of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2012.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2012 Hilary Mantel (P)2020 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Juana of Castile, third child of the Spanish monarchs Isabel and Fernando, grows up with no hope of inheriting her parents' crowns, but as a princess knows her duty: to further her family's ambitions through marriage. Yet stories of courtly love, and of her parents' own legendary romance, surround her. When she weds the Duke of Burgundy, a young man so beautiful that he is known as Philippe the Handsome, she dares to hope that she might have both love and crowns.
By: Lynn Cullen
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The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn
- By: Robin Maxwell
- Narrated by: Suzan Crowley
- Length: 13 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Robin Maxwell’s debut novel introduces Anne Boleyn and her daughter, Elizabeth: one was queen for a thousand days, the other for more than 40 years. Both were passionate, headstrong women, loved and hated by Henry VIII. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, her mother’s private diary is given to her by a mysterious lady. In reading it, the young ruler - herself embroiled in a dangerous love affair - discovers a great deal about her much maligned mother.
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One of the Best Tudor Novels Availalbe
- By Bonnie-Ann on 03-02-13
By: Robin Maxwell
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In the Name of the Family
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Dunant
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1502, and Rodrigo Borgia, a self-confessed womanizer and master of political corruption, is now on the papal throne as Alexander VI. His daughter Lucrezia, age 22 - already three times married and a pawn in her father's plans - is discovering her own power. And then there is his son Cesare Borgia, brilliant, ruthless, and increasingly unstable; it is his relationship with Machiavelli that gives the Florentine diplomat a master class in the dark arts of power and politics.
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One of the best historical fiction novels
- By GrandmaNurseHeather on 04-13-17
By: Sarah Dunant
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Empress
- Godspeaker, Book 1
- By: Karen Miller
- Narrated by: Josephine Bailey
- Length: 20 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In a family torn apart by poverty and violence, Hekat is no more than an unwanted mouth to feed, worth only a few coins from a passing slave trader. But Hekat was not born to be a slave. For her, a different path has been chosen. It is a path that will take her from stinking back alleys to the house of her God, from blood-drenched battlefields to the glittering palaces of Mijak. This is the story of Hekat, slave to no man.
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depressing and left me feeling empty
- By Bonnie on 09-16-09
By: Karen Miller
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The Boleyn King
- Boleyn Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Laura Andersen
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 9 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Just seventeen years old, Henry IX, known as William, is a king bound by the restraints of the regency yet anxious to prove himself. With the French threatening battle and the Catholics sowing the seeds of rebellion at home, William trusts only three people: his older sister Elizabeth; his best friend and loyal counselor, Dominic; and Minuette, a young orphan raised as a royal ward by William’s mother, Anne Boleyn.
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Great idea, bad story
- By S. D. Ristick on 09-22-14
By: Laura Andersen
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First of the Tudors
- By: Joanna Hickson
- Narrated by: Tom Clegg, Non Haf
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Jasper Tudor, son of Queen Catherine and her second husband, Owen Tudor, has grown up far from the intrigue of the royal court. But after he and his brother Edmund are summoned to London, their half brother, King Henry VI, takes a keen interest in their future. Bestowing earldoms on them both, Henry also gives them the wardship of the young heiress Margaret Beaufort. Although she is still a child, Jasper becomes devoted to her and is devastated when Henry arranges her betrothal to Edmund.
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War of the Roses, Again
- By Laurel on 03-27-17
By: Joanna Hickson
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Green Darkness
- By: Anya Seton
- Narrated by: Heather Wilds
- Length: 23 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The marriage of the Englishman Richard Marsdon and his young American wife, Celia, slowly turns tragic as Richard withdraws into himself and Celia suffers a debilitating emotional breakdown. A wise mystic realizes that Celia can escape her past only by reliving it. She journeys back four hundred years to her former life as the servant girl Celia de Bohun during the reign of Edward VI - and to her doomed love affair with the chaplain Stephen Marsdon.
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A different narrator would have made all the difference.
- By J on 06-04-15
By: Anya Seton
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A Dangerous Inheritance
- By: Alison Weir
- Narrated by: Maggie Mash
- Length: 25 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Historian and New York Times best-selling author Alison Weir is acclaimed for her absorbing works about the infamous House of York and House of Tudor lines. In A Dangerous Inheritance, Weir uses her wealth of knowledge to craft a compelling novel about two women, living 70 years apart, who are linked through the mysterious disappearance of King Richard III's nephews, Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury - also known as the Princes in the Tower.
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Not Weir's Best
- By Joshua on 01-08-13
By: Alison Weir
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Katherine
- A Novel
- By: Anya Seton
- Narrated by: Lorna Bennett
- Length: 29 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Set in the vibrant fourteenth century of Chaucer and the Black Death, the story features knights fighting in battle, serfs struggling in poverty, and the magnificent Plantagenets—Edward III, the Black Prince, and Richard II—who rule despotically over a court rotten with intrigue. Within this era of danger and romance, John of Gaunt, the king’s son, falls passionately in love with the already-married Katherine. Their affair persists through decades of war, adultery, murder, loneliness, and redemption.
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my favorite novel brought to life
- By Heather on 10-04-23
By: Anya Seton
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The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
- A Novel
- By: C. W. Gortner
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 15 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In this brilliantly imagined novel, acclaimed author C. W. Gortner brings Catherine to life in her own voice, allowing us to enter the intimate world of a woman whose determination to protect her family’s throne and realm plunged her into a lethal struggle for power. From the fairy-tale chateaux of the Loire Valley to the battlefields of the wars of religion to the mob-filled streets of Paris, this is the extraordinary untold journey of one of the most maligned and misunderstood women ever to be queen.
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Pretty good but historical details are terrible
- By Kindle Customer on 07-10-11
By: C. W. Gortner
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The Iron King
- The Accursed Kings, Book 1
- By: Maurice Druon
- Narrated by: Peter Joyce
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
From the publishers that brought you A Game of Thrones comes the series that inspired George R.R. Martin’s epic work. France became a great nation under Philip the Fair - but it was a greatness achieved at the expense of her people, for his was a reign characterised by violence, the scandalous adulteries of his daughters-in-law, and the triumph of royal authority.
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Historical Goodie
- By Syd Young on 08-03-13
By: Maurice Druon
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A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden - and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.
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Disaster
- By Frank Dudley Berry Jr. on 08-01-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden - and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.
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Disaster
- By Frank Dudley Berry Jr. on 08-01-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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Learning to Talk
- Stories
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood, Patrick Moy
- Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.
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Stories only Hilary Mantel could write
- By BG on 04-26-23
By: Hilary Mantel
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Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
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tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
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A Change of Climate
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Sandra Duncan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
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Beautifully written
- By Patricia S. on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
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Hurricane Season
- By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabon, Ana Osorio
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
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Wow
- By Anonymous User on 11-20-20
By: Fernanda Melchor, and others
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Fludd
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin - or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action.
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Small, tight irreverant novel that wryly inverts
- By Darwin8u on 07-21-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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A Place of Greater Safety
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 33 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden - and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter.
-
-
Disaster
- By Frank Dudley Berry Jr. on 08-01-13
By: Hilary Mantel
-
Learning to Talk
- Stories
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck, Jane Collingwood, Patrick Moy
- Length: 3 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the wake of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant conclusion to her award-winning Wolf Hall Trilogy, this collection of loosely autobiographical stories locates the transforming moments of a haunted childhood. Sharp and funny, these drawn-from-life stories begin in the 1950s in an insular northern village “scoured by bitter winds and rough gossip tongues.” For the child narrator, the only way to survive is to get up, get on, get out.
-
-
Stories only Hilary Mantel could write
- By BG on 04-26-23
By: Hilary Mantel
-
Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
-
-
tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
-
A Change of Climate
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Sandra Duncan
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ralph and Anna Eldred are an exemplary couple, devoting themselves to doing good. 30 years ago as missionaries in Africa, the worst that could happen did. Shattered by their encounter with inexplicable evil, they returned to England, never to speak of it again. But when Ralph falls into an affair, Anna finds no forgiveness in her heart, and 30 years of repressed rage and grief explode, destroying not only a marriage but also their love, their faith, and everything they thought they were.
-
-
Beautifully written
- By Patricia S. on 10-11-15
By: Hilary Mantel
-
Hurricane Season
- By: Fernanda Melchor, Sophie Hughes - translator
- Narrated by: Inés del Castillo, Tim Pabon, Ana Osorio
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse - by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals - propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.
-
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Wow
- By Anonymous User on 11-20-20
By: Fernanda Melchor, and others
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Fludd
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin - or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action.
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-
Small, tight irreverant novel that wryly inverts
- By Darwin8u on 07-21-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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Pulphead
- Essays
- By: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Narrated by: John Jeremiah Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight of Joan Didion, Sullivan shows us - with a laidback, erudite Southern charm that's all his own - how we really (no, really) live now.
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Interesting Perspectives
- By Nancy on 09-05-24
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A Manual for Cleaning Women
- Selected Stories
- By: Lucia Berlin
- Narrated by: Thom Rivera, Dawn Harvey, Carol Monda, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
A Manual for Cleaning Women compiles the best work of the legendary short-story writer Lucia Berlin. With the grit of Raymond Carver, the humor of Grace Paley, and a blend of wit and melancholy all her own, Berlin crafts miracles from the everyday, uncovering moments of grace in the laundromats and halfway houses of the American Southwest, in the homes of the Bay Area upper class, among switchboard operators and struggling mothers, hitchhikers, and bad Christians.
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Exquisite writing, lopsided performances
- By Sazafrass on 03-02-16
By: Lucia Berlin
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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
- Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
- By: Saidiya Hartman
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.
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Utterly beautiful!
- By L.A. on 12-27-19
By: Saidiya Hartman
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Men We Reaped
- A Memoir
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write, she realized the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.
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Tough but important
- By Jermell Powell on 09-26-21
By: Jesmyn Ward
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How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
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Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
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Persepolis
- The History and Legacy of the Ancient Persian Empire's Capital City
- By: Charles River Editors
- Narrated by: Scott Clem
- Length: 1 hr and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Lying in the middle of a plain in modern-day Iran is a forgotten ancient city, Persepolis. Built two and a half thousand years ago, it was known in its day as the richest city under the sun. Persepolis was the capital of Persia, the largest empire the world had ever seen, but after its destruction, it was largely forgotten for nearly 2,000 years, and the lives and achievements of those who built it were almost entirely erased from history.
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Veronica
- By: Mary Gaitskill
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica: an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years".
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Everything is baroque-en
- By Eric on 12-14-06
By: Mary Gaitskill
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Thomas Cromwell
- The Untold Story of Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant
- By: Tracy Borman
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Thomas Cromwell has long been reviled as a Machiavellian schemer who stopped at nothing in his quest for power. As Henry VIII's right-hand man, Cromwell was the architect of the English Reformation, secured Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and plotted the downfall of Anne Boleyn, and upon his arrest, was accused of trying to usurp the King himself. But here Tracy Borman reveals a different side of one of the most notorious figures in history.
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narration is very well done & book is quite good
- By horoscopy on 02-18-15
By: Tracy Borman
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Secondhand Time
- The Last of the Soviets
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich - translator
- Narrated by: Amanda Carlin, Mark Bramhall, Cassandra Campbell, and others
- Length: 22 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.
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The Heart, Soul & Iron Fist Of Russia
- By Sara on 02-22-17
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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A Memoir of My Former Self
- A Life in Writing
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Anne Enright, Aurora Dawson-Hunte, Ben Miles, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In addition to her celebrated career as a novelist, Hilary Mantel contributed for years to newspapers and journals, unspooling stories from her own life and illuminating the world as she found it. “Ink is a generative fluid,” she explains. “If you don’t mean your words to breed consequences, don’t write at all.” A Memoir of My Former Self collects the finest of this writing over four decades.
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The writing. I would read the phone directory if Mantel wrote it. wonderful collection.
- By Anonymous User on 09-22-24
By: Hilary Mantel
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2666
- By: Roberto Bolaño
- Narrated by: John Lee, Armando Durán, G. Valmont Thomas, and others
- Length: 39 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
- By William on 01-05-10
By: Roberto Bolaño
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The Copenhagen Trilogy
- Childhood; Youth; Dependency
- By: Tove Ditlevsen, Tiina Nunnally - translator, Michael Favala Goldman - translator
- Narrated by: Stine Wintlev
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Called "a masterpiece" by The Guardian, this courageous and honest trilogy from Tove Ditlevsen, a pioneer in the field of genre-bending confessional writing, explores themes of family, sex, motherhood, abortion, addiction, and being an artist. This program contains all three volumes of her memoirs.
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Masterpiece
- By David Batcher on 03-21-21
By: Tove Ditlevsen, and others
What listeners say about Bring Up the Bodies
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Emily elegado
- 12-13-23
Why did I go so long without this..?
I didn’t realize there was anything to follow Wolf Hall.. the ending always seemed premature. Imagine my excitement when I saw this pop up on my fyp! Great book, fantastic read.
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- Edward S. Gardner
- 08-24-21
very well done
loved it, hard to understand the King's role in this. also Cromwell's of course.
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- Elizabeth
- 12-04-23
Excellent continuation.
This is a well told tale, the narrator being excellent. It’s an interesting and entertaining read.
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- Claudia A. Pruitt
- 11-04-22
Riveting!
This series is truly riveting. I feel as of I am on the rooms and locations listening witnessing their conversations, being privy to their thoughts - totally engrossed. The narrator is exceptional. The emotions in his reading are so vivid it is like watching a play.
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- Cindy Mercer
- 03-28-23
Excellent read AND listen
By the time you get to the 2nd book, Bring Up The Bodies, you know the characters well and they develop throughout the story. I love this reader and highly recommend the series.
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- Ann M Toebbe
- 12-01-22
Ravishing writing, spellbinding performance.
Like Wolf Hall, the writing is nothing short of miraculous in its precision, immediacy, lyricism and insight. And the performance is so good you want it to last forever.
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- mnichols
- 02-14-23
Just incredible.
I can’t seem to stop listening. The narration is excellent and the story is utterly hypnotic.
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- Chris
- 10-09-23
Just exceptional
After wolf hall I couldn’t imagine how the series would get better, but it does. The pros and the dialogue of this book are exceptional.
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- Jefferson
- 08-01-22
Fascinating, Suspenseful, & Beautiful, but Tawdry
Hillary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies (2012) starts just after Wolf Hall (2009) ends. Thomas More has been executed, Henry has been divorced from Katherine and married to Anne Boleyn for three years, but they only have one child, Elizabeth, and the aging Henry is falling in love with Jane Seymour, the quiet, shy antidote to proud, prickly Anne. The royal progress of the King and his servants, hangers on, and friends has reached Wolf Hall, home of the Seymours, with whom they hunt, hawk, talk, and eat and drink. One young lord, Weston, is with stunning stupidity openly insulting to Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell at fifty is working indefatigably for Henry and England as Master Secretary, Master of the Rolls, Chancellor of Cambridge University, and has his hand in everything else, displaying all of his many talents and qualities: wit, tact, patience, memory, strategy, secrecy, poker face, ruthlessness, sympathy for the poor, and love for his family. He’ll one moment hire into his house a toothless vagabond who claims he was a jester for a lord who got blown up and the next moment tell a ward that when diplomacy fails, you’d better get your axe out while your enemy is still abed. It has been rumored that he was interested in remarrying to Jane Seymour, but as he observes his king falling in love with her, he morphs into a Pandarus-Machiavelli. He, Cromwell, is not without axes to grind for anyone guilty of cruel and callous treatment to his revered former master Cardinal Wolsey when he fell from favor. Cromwell indeed has a long and perfect memory. During high stakes discussions and decisions involving the Holy Roman Emperor, the Pope, the King of France, Henry’s daughter by Katherine Mary, the supposed lovers of Anne Boleyn, and so on, he, Cromwell, often departs the present to revisit the past about things like his beloved deceased wife and daughters, his violent father, his first and last foray into a military career, and his start in the world of Italian banking.
Hillary Mantel works into her narrative many details on the international and national historical and cultural situations: Henry feeling insecure on his throne because of lurking Plantagenents and hostile Pope and Emperor; Cromwell working on ways to transfer the money and power of the monasteries to the crown; Moscovites invading Poland (!); etc. Also, plenty of historical details about life in 16th-century England and Europe: festivals, foods, religion, books, monasteries, jousting, clothes, etc. Plenty of themes about life and death and gender, too. And she writes splendid prose:
“Just in time to frown at this, Sir Nicholas Carew has made an entrance. He does not come into a room like lesser men, but rolls in like a siege engine or some formidable hurling device, and now halting before Cromwell, he looks as if he wishes to bombard him.”
“A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill sharpened can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels.”
“If dogs could smell out treason, Rich would be a blood hound, that prince among trufflers.”
“You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron. When you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.”
“He takes the child to a looking glass so she can see her wings. Her steps are tentative, she is in awe at herself. Mirrored, the peacock eyes speak to him. Do not forget us. As the year turns, we are here: a whisper, a touch, a feather’s breath from you.”
“These days are perfect. The clear untroubled light picks out each berry shimmering in a hedge. Each leaf of a tree, the sun behind it, hangs like a golden pear.”
“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around. Out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”
Mantel’s narrative techniques are noteworthy. As in Wolf Hall, she frequently refers to Cromwell by he and his name, e.g., “he, Cromwell, says.” Why? She could just write, “Cromwell says.” The many “he, Cromwell” phrases add weight to his, Cromwell’s, personality. They become hypnotic. Mantel’s narrator is also given to addressing “you” (e.g., “The boom of the cannon catches them unawares, shuddering across the water. You feel the jolt inside, in your bones”) and recruiting the reader with a “we” (e.g., “We are coming to the sweet season of the year, when the air is mild and the leaves pale and lemon cakes are flavored with lavender, egg custards barely set, infused with a sprig of basil, elderflowers simmered in a sugar syrup and poured over halved strawberries”) These touches accompany her present tense narration. Usually, I loathe the trendy present tense in novels, especially historical fiction, but Mantel is such a fine writer of such pristine prose, that I liked it.
The book is an absorbing series of vivid, intense, high stakes scenes. Even if you know the history (Henry working through a series of hapless wives in his quest for novelty, variety, and sons), Mantel makes it page turning through her beautiful and potent style, her witty dialogue, her sense of time and place. Like the best historical fiction, it is utterly convincing and immersive, exotic and human.
Audiobook reader Ben Miles is great: terse, dry, witty, intelligent; rough for Cromwell; wannabe French for Anne; petulant or naïve for Henry; salty and foul for Norfolk; toothless and savory for ex-jester Anthony; all voices just right, whether young or old, British or foreign, male or female, etc., and no straining for effect.
However, despite Mantel’s wonderful writing and absorbing story and Mile’s great reading of it, it started making me feel dirty. After Cromwell playing Cupid if not Pandarus for Henry vis-a-vis Jane, he starts digging up (or manufacturing) dirt on Anne Boleyn by interrogating her ladies in waiting and a musician/singer. All because Henry has gotten a taste for divorce. It’s tawdry.
Of course, it’s also history, and I am looking forward to the third book in the trilogy to see how Cromwell ends up. He is a complicated and compelling character: brilliant, capable, unflappable, witty, cultured, international, sympathetic (to the poor and the underdog), loyal (to the king and England), strategizing a step ahead of everyone else and always remaining his secret self. Not above taking bribes or threatening or tempting foolish and vulnerable people to gain his objectives. Is he TOO good to be true? Maybe his luck will run out or his knack decline. He will deserve what fate he receives.
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- Dalton Knisley
- 02-15-23
Great read!
I enjoyed getting to read this fabulous book! Lots of great information and starting points to dig in a bit deeper.
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