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Build Your House Around My Body
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Quyen Ngo
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
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Publisher's summary
Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into “a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve” (The New York Times Editors’ Choice).
FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION’S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews
“Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith’s first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities.”—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge.
1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed.
2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace.
The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all.
Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last minute.
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Critic reviews
"I loved this epic book - beautiful, brilliant, powerful, and shivery-back-of-the-neck terrifying." (Madeline Miller, author of Circe)
“Violet Kupersmith’s eerie and electric debut novel...followed me into my days, refusing to release me.... This is a big, packed novel. Reading it provides a sensation not unlike riding on a motorbike overloaded with passengers and wares: It careens, it tilts and at times I wondered if it would reach its destination without a crash. But Kupersmith proves herself a fearless driver who revels in the daunting challenge she has set for herself. There are so many ways this novel could have lost its balance; instead, its too-much-ness makes for a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve.” (New York Times)
“Haunting and unforgettable.” (Bust)
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We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
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Vanishing Falls
- A Novel
- By: Poppy Gee
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Deep within the lush Tasmanian rainforest is the remote town of Vanishing Falls, a place with a storied past. The town’s showpiece, built in the 1800s, is its Calendar House - currently occupied by Jack Lily, a prominent art collector and landowner; his wife, Celia; and their four daughters. The elaborate, eccentrically designed mansion houses one masterpiece and 52 rooms - and Celia Lily isn’t in any of them. She has vanished without a trace.… Joelle Smithton knows that a few folks in Vanishing Falls believe that she’s simple-minded.
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OK Story
- By Cindy House on 12-21-21
By: Poppy Gee
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The Saturday Night Ghost Club
- A Novel
- By: Craig Davidson
- Narrated by: Corey Brill
- Length: 5 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up in 1980s Niagara Falls - a seedy but magical, slightly haunted place - Jake Baker spends most of his time with his uncle Calvin, a kind but eccentric enthusiast of occult artifacts and conspiracy theories. The summer Jake turns 12, he befriends a pair of siblings new to town, and so Calvin decides to initiate them all into the "Saturday Night Ghost Club." But as the summer goes on, what begins as a seemingly light-hearted project may ultimately uncover more than any of its members had imagined.
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Emotionless
- By Noura on 10-18-20
By: Craig Davidson
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Beautiful story, distractingly poor narration
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moving, deep, expansive
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Interesting Concept, Dragged Out Too Long
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Tang Yitian has been living in America, estranged from his family, for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. When Yitian returns home and attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate the country’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider. So he seeks out a childhood friend: Tian Hanwen, who as a teenager was “sent down” from Shanghai to Yitian’s village as part of China’s rustication campaign.
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Beautiful story, distractingly poor narration
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Beautiful writing! Sensitive Reading!
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moving, deep, expansive
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From the high-stakes worlds of television and politics to the intimate corridors of home—including the bedroom—these wryly observed, deeply revealing stories look at life in Pakistan with humor, compassion, psychological acuity, and emotional immediacy. Childhood best friends agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret. A young woman with an anxiety disorder discovers the numbing pleasures of an illicit love affair. A radicalized student's preparations for his sister's wedding involve beating up the groom.
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One of the very few books i would give a 5 star .
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Reminiscent of VS Naipaul
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Battling numbing cold, ever-present hunger, and German soldiers determined to hunt them down, four dozen resistance fighters - escapees from a nearby ghetto - hide in a Ukrainian forest, determined to survive the war, sabotage the German war effort, and rescue as many Jews as they can from the trains taking them to concentration camps. Their leader is relentless in his efforts to turn his ragtag band of men and boys into a disciplined force that accomplishes its goals without losing its moral compass.
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Dancer
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Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the '80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon.
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What a Happy Family
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From the outside, the Joshi family is the quintessential Indian American family. Decades ago, Bina and Deepak immigrated to America, where she became a pillar of their local Indian community and he a successful psychiatrist. Their eldest daughter, Suhani, is following the footsteps of her father’s career and happily married. Natasha, their middle daughter, is about to become engaged to the son of longtime family friends. And Anuj, their son - well, he’s a son, and what could be better than that? But a family scandal shows that nothing is as it seems.
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Unrealistic depiction of our mental health system
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Heaven and Earth
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Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat. Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the farm next door: Nicola, Tommaso, and Bern - the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate, and seemingly unassailable bond. But there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret.
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Definitely not a mystery
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Black Light
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With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows - those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood.
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In Holler, Child’s eleven brilliant stories, LaToya Watkins presses at the bruises of guilt, love, and circumstance. Each story introduces us to a character irrevocably shaped by place and reaching toward something—hope, reconciliation, freedom. In “Cutting Horse,” the appearance of a horse in a man’s suburban backyard places a former horse breeder in trouble with the police. In “Holler, Child,” a mother is forced into an impossible position when her son gets in a kind of trouble she knows too well from the other side.
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In the final year of the nineteenth century, Peter Winceworth is toiling away at the letter S for Swansby’s multivolume Encyclopaedic Dictionary. But his disaffection with his colleagues compels him to assert some individual purpose and artistic freedom, and he begins inserting unauthorized, fictitious entries.
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The liar’s Dictionary
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The History of a Difficult Child
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Wisecracking, inquisitive, and bombastic, Selam Asmelash is the youngest child in her large, boisterous family. Even before she is born, she has a wry, bewitching omniscience that animates life in her Small Town in southwestern Ethiopia in the 1980s. Selam and her father listen to the radio in secret as the socialist military junta that recently overthrew the government seizes properties and wages civil war in the North. The Asmelashes, once an enterprising, land-owning family, are ostracized under the new regime.
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Intriguingly Unusual
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The Weight of a Piano
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In 1962, in the Soviet Union, eight-year-old Katya is bequeathed what will become the love of her life: a Blüthner piano, on which she discovers an enriching passion for music. Yet after she marries, her husband insists the family emigrate to America - and loses her piano in the process. In 2012, in Bakersfield, California, 26-year-old Clara Lundy is burdened by the last gift her father gave her before he and her mother died in a terrible house fire: a Blüthner upright she has never learned to play. In sudden frustration, she decides to sell it.
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The Key to Enjoying this Book
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Daughters of the Dust
- A Gullah-Geechee Novel
- By: Julie Dash
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
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- Unabridged
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Drawing from the magical world of her iconic Sundance award-winning film, Julie Dash’s stand-alone novel tells another rich, historical tale of the Gullah-Geechee people: a multigenerational story about a Brooklyn College anthropology student who finds an unexpected homecoming when she heads to the South Carolina Sea Islands to study her ancestors.
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My BFF Bahni...
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By: Julie Dash
What listeners say about Build Your House Around My Body
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joseph Mega
- 03-07-24
Great ingredients put together a bit messily
This story had everything I love in a novel - folklore, magical realism, horror. It started off with a recipe for a fantastic novel but, in the end, ultimately felt a little too disorganized and incomplete. Lots of intriguing stories and plot lines that I felt were never explored as much as I would have liked for a novel of this length. The ending did wrap up the main story in a satisfying way, but I left wishing I understood more about various plot lines that were ultimately left unexplored. Sort of felt like a dream with tendrils of ideas that span out but just dissolve without explanation. And maybe that was the idea, but for a novel with such great ideas and themes, I wanted more.
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- T Davies
- 04-26-23
Good but a bit unsatisfying
I enjoyed the writing style in the book. Overall, however, the ending was a bit unsatisfying. Overall I would recommend.
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- Jessica
- 10-26-21
Extraordinary ghost story
This book is so well-crafted. It’s beautifully written, well-paced, and it’s genuinely scary. It’s the right balance of horror, mystery, drama, and folklore, with moments of real humor and levity. The characters and plot are compelling, and the setting is so strong that it feels like Vietnam is it’s own character. I can’t praise it enough. It’s basically perfect. I’d be so proud of myself if I were the author.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Kira Norby
- 04-17-22
Incredibly written and performed
A friend recommended this book to me, and while it was unsettling and difficult to get through at times, it was a fantastically original and immersive story.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-13-24
Great concept, character building, history and magic. A little slow though.
Could be a little faster - but otherwise great. Loved the history and interconnected characters across class race and generation. Folklore coming to life made this a lovely magical realism story. Could’ve been a little less detailed and moved a bit faster - but otherwise good.
Amazing audio performance.
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- rdbrody
- 09-20-21
Takes a lot of work
This supernatural story bounces back and forth haphazardly between historical points so it is somewhat difficult. Look for the lightbulb moments to help navigate.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 04-11-23
a great read
if you like a slow burn creepy story this will absolutely deliver for you!
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- Nichole H
- 05-05-23
Worth a second listen
This book is strange, captivating, rich, mysterious, dark, and sometimes funny. It's magical realism feels deeply cultural, and the book is well read. I may listen again, to better absorb the details.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-13-22
Confusingly good read.
This book turned out to be a really good read. I had to stop almost halfway through to start over from the beginning. I was confused as to how the various characters connected to each other. After starting over, I was able to connect the dots better and it just made the story that much more intriguing. I’ll definitely have to listen again now that I’ve completed it because I still have questions and want to connect the rest of the dots. I’d highly recommend this for those that like mystery and enjoy the mind bending experience of trying to piece together puzzles for the bigger picture.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Nicole Dash
- 05-24-22
Incredible
This story is amazing. It’s eery and beautiful. A wonderfully talented author. Enjoy this fabulous ride.
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