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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
About this listen
A middle-aged couple struggles with the husband’s descent into early-onset Lewy Body dementia in this profound and deeply moving novel shot through with Kirshenbaum’s lacerating humor.
It begins with hallucinations. From their living room window, Leo sees a man on stilts, an acting troupe, a pair of swans paddling on the street. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to visual impairment—they are something he and his wife, Addie, can joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but fleeting, oddities that mimic myriad brain disorders: aphasia, the inability to perform simple tasks, Capgras Syndrome, audial hallucinations he believes to be real. The doctors have no answers. Leo, a scientist, and Addie, a collage artist, had a loving and happy marriage. But as his periods of lucidity become rarer, Addie finds herself less and less able to cope.
Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with Lewy Body disease. Life expectancy ranges from 3 to 20 years. A decidedly uncharacteristic act of violence makes it clear that he cannot come home. He moves first to an assisted living facility and then to a small apartment with a caretaker where, over time, he descends into full cognitive decline. Addie’s agony, anger, and guilt result in self-imposed isolation, which mirrors Leo’s diminished life. And so for years, all she can do is watch him die—too soon, and yet not soon enough.
Kirshenbaum captures the couple’s final years, months, and days in short scenes that burn with despair, humor, and rage, tracking the brutal destruction of the disease, as well the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them amid the larger tides of loss.
©2025 Binnie Kirshenbaum (P)2025 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best friends.
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a look into such a different world.
- By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on 05-15-25
By: Nell Zink
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Bad Nature
- A Novel
- By: Ariel Courage
- Narrated by: Cia Court
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Hester is diagnosed with terminal cancer on her fortieth birthday, she knows immediately what she must do: abandon her possessions and drive to California to kill her estranged father. With no friends or family tying her to the life she’s built in New York City, she quits her wildly lucrative job in corporate law and starts driving west. She hasn’t made it far when she runs into John, an environmental activist in need of a ride to different superfund sites across the United States.
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Sad life, sad ending
- By C. R. Choate on 05-17-25
By: Ariel Courage
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Lucky Night
- A Novel
- By: Eliza Kennedy
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After six years of a stolen hour here, another there, tonight is going to be different for Nick Holloway and Jenny Parrish. They’ve booked a room in a new luxury hotel in Manhattan, where they’ll spend the entire night together for the first time. Expectations are running high for this brief reprieve from ordinary life: they both need a good bout of ravishing sex and witty conversation. But that’s not what they get. Because they’ve barely gotten started when a smoke alarm goes off.
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Good for teens
- By Sam Farah on 04-10-25
By: Eliza Kennedy
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Mona Acts Out
- A Novel
- By: Mischa Berlinski
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she’s still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow (“I forgot the parsley!” is her lame excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded.
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Fun book with an inside look at live theatre
- By Elizabeth Ratner on 06-29-25
By: Mischa Berlinski
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Gothictown
- By: Emily Carpenter
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In an immersive Southern Gothic with echoes of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, a restauranteur lured by pandemic-era incentives moves her family to a seemingly idyllic small town in Georgia, only to discover a darkness lurking beneath the Southern hospitality and sun-dappled streets.
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Not a favorite.
- By Melonie Wargo on 07-10-25
By: Emily Carpenter
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Full Speed to a Crash Landing
- Chaotic Orbits, Book 1
- By: Beth Revis
- Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg, David Bendena
- Length: 4 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Ada Lamarr may have gotten to the spaceship wreck first, but looter’s rights won’t get her far when she’s got a hole in the side of her ship and her spacesuit is almost out of air. Fortunately for her, help arrives in the form of a government salvage crew—and while they rescue her from certain death, they are not pleased to have an unexpected passenger along on their classified mission. But Ada doesn’t care—all that matters to her is enjoying their fine food and sweet, sweet oxygen—until Rian White, the government agent in charge, starts to suspect that there’s more to Ada than meets the eye.
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The art of the con
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 04-10-25
By: Beth Revis
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Twist
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
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So happy he’s still writing fiction
- By Franki on 03-31-25
By: Colum McCann
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Thrill Ride
- By: Amy Ratcliffe
- Narrated by: Jessica Gardner
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Business meets pleasure at a family-owned theme park in this sexy, fun-filled debut from the former Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist, as a thrill ride designer shows a straitlaced suit the lighter side of life—and discovers a whole new perspective of her own…
By: Amy Ratcliffe
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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh
- A Novel
- By: Colwill Brown
- Narrated by: Colwill Brown
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
“Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” But Doncaster’s also the home of Rach, Shaz, and Kel, bezzies since childhood and Donny lasses through and through. Never mind that Rach is skeptical of Shaz’s bolder plots; or that Shaz, who comes from a rougher end of town, feels left behind when the others begin plotting a course to uni; or that Kel sometimes feels split in two trying to keep the peace―the girls are inseparable, their friendship as indestructible as they are.
By: Colwill Brown
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Hot Air
- A Novel
- By: Marcy Dermansky
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Joannie hadn’t been on a date in seven years when Johnny invites Joannie and her daughter to dinner. His house is beautiful, his son is sweet, and their first kiss is, well, it’s not the best, but Joannie could convince herself it was nice enough. But when Joannie’s childhood crush, a summer-camp fling turned famous billionaire, crash-lands his hot-air balloon in Johnny’s swimming pool, Joannie dives in.
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It was soooo bad. I had to quit midway thru.
- By malibooboo on 04-22-25
By: Marcy Dermansky
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Held
- A Novel
- By: Anne Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Michaels
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
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Would give six stars if possible
- By love it on 08-31-24
By: Anne Michaels
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Exemplar
- The Autonomous Sequence, Book 1
- By: Alastair Wells
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
After damaging climate change, humanity is divided, torn into the technophobic nature-worshippers on Earth and the banished children of science on the new worlds. Jaruss awakens, drifting 300 light-years from Earth, trapped, memoryless, and alone. Who is he, where does he come from, and what are these recurring nightmares that trouble his sleep? To find out, he must outwit an efficiency-obsessed AI and join the dangerous crew of the stealth ship, Pangolin.
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Nothing Original
- By TERRENCE P DUGAN on 04-06-25
By: Alastair Wells
Sharing the journey of losing a husband to young onset Lewy Body Dementia
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