Charming Billy
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Barrie Kreinik
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By:
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Alice McDermott
About this listen
*Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary with a brand new audiobook recording*
*Winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction*
*Program includes a bonus conversation between Alice McDermott and Matthew Thomas, New York Times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed novel We Are Not Ourselves*
Alice McDermott's striking audiobook, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide.
Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic.
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Critic reviews
“This is fiction as good as it gets.” —USA Today
“A luminous and affecting novel.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“There's no one like Alice McDermott for catching the ebullient particulars of the Irish-American sensibility…her touch is light as a feather, her perceptions purely accurate.” —Elle
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Two sisters, ages 10 and 16, are exiled from Brooklyn to Bird Hill in Barbados, after their mother can no longer care for them. The young Phaedra and her older sister, Dionne, live, for the summer of 1989, with their grandmother, Hyacinth, a midwife and practitioner of the local spiritual practice of obeah. Dionne spends the summer in search of love, testing her grandmother's limits, and wanting to go home. Phaedra explores Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations.
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My absolute favorite book of all time
- By Eme on 07-16-15
By: Naomi Jackson
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Paradise
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void.
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MORRISON AT HER MOST COMPLEX
- By Kennedi Hill on 11-07-19
By: Toni Morrison
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Summer House
- A Novel
- By: Nancy Thayer
- Narrated by: Emily Durante
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of wandering from whim to whim, 30-year-old Charlotte Wheelwright seems to have at last found her niche. The free spirit enjoys running an organic gardening business on the island of Nantucket, thanks in large part to her spry grandmother Nona, who donated a portion of her land on the family's seaside compound to get Charlotte started.
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Best Nancy Thayer book I've read
- By MW on 05-07-15
By: Nancy Thayer
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The Magician's Assistant
- By: Ann Patchett
- Narrated by: Karen Ziemba
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a father she never knew he had.
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Patchett Has It
- By Pamela Harvey on 06-10-08
By: Ann Patchett
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Kiss Carlo
- By: Adriana Trigiani
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1949, and South Philadelphia bursts with opportunity during the postwar boom. The Palazzini Cab Company & Western Union Telegraph Office, owned and operated by Dominic Palazzini and his three sons, is flourishing: Business is good, and they're surrounded by sympathetic wives and daughters-in-law, with grandchildren on the way. But a decades-long feud that split Dominic and his brother, Mike, and their once-close families sets the stage for a rematch.
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Wow!!
- By MCMAK on 07-16-17
By: Adriana Trigiani
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The Wednesday Sisters
- By: Meg Waite Clayton
- Narrated by: Julie Dretzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For 35 years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967.
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Loved it!
- By Denise Wallace on 06-26-09
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Light Years
- By: James Salter
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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This exquisite, resonant novel by PEN/Faulkner winner James Salter is a brilliant portrait of a marriage by a contemporary American master. It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach.
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Unfathomable Font of Blue: Life's Serial Goodbyes
- By W Perry Hall on 04-18-19
By: James Salter
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A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True
- By: Brigid Pasulka
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
The novel opens on the eve of World War II. In the mountain village of Half-Village, a young man nicknamed the Pigeon, under the approving eyes of the entire village, courts the beautiful Anielica Hetmanska. But the war's arrival wreaks havoc in all their lives and delays their marriage for six long years.
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The Old & New Worlds Converge & Transcend Time
- By Sara on 11-22-16
By: Brigid Pasulka
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The Sound of Glass
- By: Karen White
- Narrated by: Therese Plummer, Susan Bennett
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward's husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news - Cal's family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal's reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt. Charting the course of an uncertain life - and feeling guilt from her husband's tragic death - Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal's unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff.
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You'll LAUGH, LOVE, and maybe CRY a little
- By Jennifer on 08-08-15
By: Karen White
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Rush Home Road
- By: Lori Lansens
- Narrated by: Ruby Dee
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Abridged
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When a 70-year-old woman finds a five-year-old girl abandoned on her doorstep, she is thrust into a sorrowful past that can only be conquered with the help of the girl who opened her memory - the very girl she is trying to save. This first novel, according to author Jacquelyn Mitchard, is one of "exquisite power, honesty, and conviction...quite nearly without flaws."
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filthy language and violent content
- By Anna on 12-16-11
By: Lori Lansens
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What listeners say about Charming Billy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Leah Johnson
- 07-07-23
Masterpiece
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott is truly a literary masterpiece. The writing is so elegant, the characters so real as revealed through their dialogue, and the story remarkably complex and interesting in the most human way. I couldn’t stop listening. Bravo and thank you to Alice McDermott.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Bandalier
- 05-20-23
Tedious
Unfortunately- though it held promise what with the established reputation of the author , it was none the less a boring listening experience
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Overall
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Performance
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- Robert Mooneyhan
- 04-07-21
What a graceful novel!
This novel is just beautifully constructed and doesn’t have a false note throughout. It ranges from the time when World War II is winding down into the eighties, and focuses on an Irish community of friends and relatives that is very convincingly portrayed. It’s easy to see why it won the National Book Award. Also, the narrator gives a perfectly balanced performance. Highly recommended!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jamie Tebbutt
- 08-07-23
Terrible narrator
I read this years ago love Alice McDermott books but the narration was flat. Perhaps a man’s voice would of been better.
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