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Narrated by:
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Cassandra Campbell
About this listen
A couple’s life is shattered by the husband’s diagnosis with early onset dementia. With furious compassion and bracing black humor, Kirshenbaum documents the fading of the future they'd imagined and their displacement into the alien and relentless world of Lewy body disease.
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 Manhattan streets below. Initially, Leo believes the visions are related to his terrible eyesight, something he and his wife, Addie, joke about. Then, he starts to experience occasional, but fleeting, oddities. He's unable to perform simple tasks and he hears things that aren’t real. The doctors have no answers, and his erratic disturbances multiply. Leo, 53, a scientist researching auto-immune diseases and Addie, a collage artist, had a loving and happy marriage. They'd planned on many years ahead of them of work and travel, dinner with friends, quiet evenings at home with their cat, perhaps one day a house in the country. But as Leo's periods of lucidity become rarer, those dreams fall away, and Addie finds herself less and less able to cope with an increasingly unbearable present.
Eventually, Leo is diagnosed with Lewy body disease. Life expectancy ranges from three to twenty years. An 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.
From the acclaimed author of Rabbits for Food comes another work shot through with lacerating humor, and with an acerbic second-person narrator for the ages. Kirshenbaum captures the pair'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 as the moments of love and beauty that still exist for them.
©2025 Binnie Kirshenbaum (P)2025 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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In an unnamed city in India, violence is erupting between Hindus and Muslims, each side viewing the other with suspicion, rage, and blame. As their identities sharpen, friends and colleagues turn against each other. Hospital beds fill up and classrooms empty out. Curfews are imposed. Residents flee en masse. Three intellectuals find themselves paralyzed by anxiety and fear. Shruti, a creative writer, spends her time writing and rewriting the same sentence. Hanif is sidelined by his academic department for his secular beliefs.
By: Geetanjali Shree, and others
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The Unwanted
- A Novel
- By: Boris Fishman
- Narrated by: Youssif Kamal
- Length: 13 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their country. Even as their fellow "minority-sect" neighbors and classmates are murdered or imprisoned, George’s loyal work teaching "dominant-sect" literature has kept them fed and protected. But then the day comes: the university fires George—despite his years of collaboration, he is no longer safe. Left without money or allies, it is time for the family to run.
By: Boris Fishman
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She's a Lamb!
- By: Meredith Hambrock
- Narrated by: Stephanie Willing
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Jessamyn St. Germain is meant to be a star. Not an actor who occasionally books yogurt commercials and certainly not a lowly usher at one of Vancouver’s smallest regional theaters. No, she is bound for greatness, and that’s why the part of Maria in the theater’s upcoming production of The Sound of Music is hers. Or it’s going to be.
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Like a decent into madness in the best way possible
- By Lindsey on 04-11-25
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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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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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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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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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“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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Exemplar
- The Autonomous Sequence, Book 1
- By: Alastair Wells
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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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
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A/S/L
- By: Jeanne Thornton
- Narrated by: Jeanne Thornton
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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It is 1998; Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, and they are making Saga of the Sorceress, a game that will change everything, if only for the three of them. 18 years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators.
By: Jeanne Thornton
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What to Expect When You're Dead
- An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife
- By: Robert Garland
- Narrated by: Zeb Soanes
- Length: 8 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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What to Expect When You're Dead chronicles the ways ancient peoples answered questions such as: How to achieve a good death and afterlife? What's the best way to dispose of a body? Do the dead face a postmortem judgement—and where do they end up? Do the dead have bodies in the afterlife—and can they eat, drink, and have sex? And what can the living do to stay on good terms with the nonliving?
By: Robert Garland
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The Snares
- A Novel
- By: Rav Grewal-Kök
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the waning months of George W. Bush’s presidency, Neel Chima, a former naval officer and federal prosecutor, is recruited to join a new federal intelligence agency—one with greater than usual powers and fewer than usual restrictions. Neel soon finds himself intimately involved in the surveillance of domestic terrorism suspects and the selection of foreigners for drone assassination—men who often look just like his Sikh family members. As both his ambitions and his moral qualms mount, he is drawn farther and farther away from his wife and two young daughters.
By: Rav Grewal-Kök
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My Documents
- A Novel
- By: Kevin Nguyen
- Narrated by: Kelly Marie Tran
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Informed by real-life events, from Japanese incarceration to the Vietnam War and modern-day immigrant detention, Kevin Nguyen’s novel gives us a version of reality only a few degrees away from our own. Moving and finely attuned to both the brutalities and mundanities of racism, Mỹ Documents is a strangely funny and touching portrait of American ambition, fear, and family. The story of the Nguyens is one of resilience and how we return to one another, and to ourselves, after tragedy.
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A concept of a plan for a novel
- By Reader X on 04-22-25
By: Kevin Nguyen
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Dissolution
- A Novel
- By: Nicholas Binge
- Narrated by: Charlotte Strevens, David Thorpe, Joe Eyre
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life. When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn't losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she's told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.
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Lost interest after 25%
- By holly b on 04-08-25
By: Nicholas Binge
What listeners say about Counting Backwards
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Elliott Greene
- 04-19-25
Sharing the journey of losing a husband to young onset Lewy Body Dementia
Thank you for sharing and being willing to count backwards. So many things I also experienced. I'm very sorry for your loss. It's so important to keep educating about young onset. Thank you.
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