
Crooked Seeds
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Fiona Ramsay
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By:
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Karen Jennings
About this listen
A woman in post-apartheid South Africa confronts her family’s troubling past in this taut and daring novel about national trauma and collective guilt—from the Booker Prize-longlisted author of An Island.
“Extraordinary . . . unputdownable.”—Roddy Doyle
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The Guardian, Irish Times, CrimeReads
Cape Town, 2028. The land cracks from a years-long drought, the nearby mountains threaten to burn, and the queue for the water trucks grows ever longer.
In her crumbling corner of a public housing complex, Deidre van Deventer receives a call from the South African police. Her family home, recently reclaimed by the government, has become the scene of a criminal investigation. The remains of several bodies have just been unearthed from her land, after decades underground. Detectives pepper Deidre with questions: Was your brother a member of a pro-apartheid group in the 1990s? Is it true that he was building bombs as part of a terrorist plot?
Deidre doesn’t know the answers to the detectives’ questions. All she knows is that she was denied—repeatedly—the life she felt she deserved. Overshadowed by her brother, then left behind by her daughter after she emigrated, Deidre must watch over her aging mother and make do with government help and the fading generosity of her neighbors while the landscape around her grows more and more combustible. As alarming evidence from the investigation continues to surface, and detectives pressure her to share what she knows of her family’s disturbing past, Deidre must finally face her own shattered memories so that something better might emerge for her and her country.
In exquisitely spare prose, Karen Jennings weaves a singularly powerful novel about post-apartheid South Africa. It is an unforgettable, propulsive story of fractured families, collective guilt, the ways we become trapped in prisons of our own making, and how we can begin to break free.
©2024 Karen Jennings (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“This is an extraordinary novel. It is shattering, almost unbearable, yet—so good, so clear—it is unputdownable.”—Roddy Doyle, Booker Prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
“Karen Jennings is a modern master of the castaway novel. Her characters are often exiled from the world—physically or psychologically, sometimes both. Crooked Seed’s Deidre and Trudy are unforgettable characters living on the margins of life. Together they make this an unsparing, yet profoundly beautiful novel.”—Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen and An Orchestra of Minorities
“Deidre’s the kind of character who gets under your skin: furious, flawed, and utterly unique. Jennings writes about broken people with unflinching honesty and deep compassion. This is a quietly devastating novel.”—Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
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Story
When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.
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Narration was Fantastic
- By Ameera on 05-15-25
By: Nussaibah Younis
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Story of a Heart
- By: Rachel Clarke
- Narrated by: Rachel Clarke
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The first of our organs to form and the last to die, the heart is both a simple pump and the symbol of what makes us human; as long as it continues to beat, there is hope. In The Story of a Heart, Dr. Rachel Clarke interweaves the history of medical innovations behind transplant surgery with the story of two children—one of whom desperately needs a new heart.
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Great Read!
- By "leaves24" on 03-16-25
By: Rachel Clarke
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The Artist and the Feast
- By: Lucy Steeds
- Narrated by: Tanya Reynolds
- Length: 11 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
During a scorching summer in 1920s Provence, a young journalist, Joseph Adelaide, turns up at the farmhouse of reclusive artist Edouard Tartuffe, hoping to write an article about him. There, he meets Ettie, Tartuffe’s niece, who appears to do everything for her uncle—from cooking and cleaning to catering to his maniacal moods. Joseph is beguiled by where he finds himself, not just by this foreign place or Tartuffe himself, but by Ettie, who watches everything so quietly from the periphery.
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A masterpiece!
- By Kaye R on 06-29-25
By: Lucy Steeds
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Birding
- By: Rose Ruane
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the nineties, Lydia was one half of a teen pop group. Their image was sexy, edgy, girly yet 'in control.' The reality was very different. Now, thirty years later, with #MeToo revelations a daily reality, a famous ex-lover resurfaces with a slick, self-serving apology, demanding forgiveness. Suddenly, Lydia is overwhelmed with memories of a harmful time in her life that refuses to leave her in peace.
By: Rose Ruane
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The Dream Hotel
- A Novel
- By: Laila Lalami
- Narrated by: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan
- Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.
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The next parable of the sower
- By Jess on 03-18-25
By: Laila Lalami
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Private Revolutions
- Four Women Face China's New Social Order
- By: Yuan Yang
- Narrated by: Crystal Yu, Gabby Wong, Kae Alexander, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
While serving as the deputy Beijing bureau chief of the Financial Times, Chinese-British journalist Yuan Yang began to notice common threads in the lives of her Chinese peers—women born during China’s turn toward capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, who, despite the country's enormous economic gains during their lifetimes, were coming up against deeply entrenched barriers as they sought to achieve financial stability. This transporting and indelible book traces the journey of four such women as they try to make better lives for themselves and their families in the new Chinese economy.
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Insightful window
- By Shauna on 04-07-25
By: Yuan Yang
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Somewhere Else
- Random Travels on this Small Planet
- By: Merri Melde
- Narrated by: Virtual Voice
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Merri Melde has spent over two cumulative years of her life traveling, answering to an inexplicable need to see the world, to experience different adventures, cultures, people and places. Taken from her travel journals, Somewhere Else features some of her backpack travels in Nepal, where she trekked the Annapurna Circuit; India, where exceptional highs and vexing lows included visiting the most incredible Taj Mahal, riding camels in the Rajasthan desert, and enduring a most entertaining 889-mile second class unreserved train ride from Bombay to Cochin; Zimbabwe, where she survived a day of ...
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Can't wait for Part 2
- By Laurel O. on 12-18-24
By: Merri Melde
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What the Wild Sea Can Be
- The Future of the World’s Ocean
- By: Helen Scales
- Narrated by: Helen Scales
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.
By: Helen Scales
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The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.
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Story line
- By vanessa l graves on 01-08-25
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The Ministry of Time
- A Novel
- By: Kaliane Bradley
- Narrated by: George Weightman, Katie Leung
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
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More than the sum of its parts but…
- By L. Williams on 05-17-24
By: Kaliane Bradley
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By the Fire We Carry
- The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
- By: Rebecca Nagle
- Narrated by: Rebecca Nagle
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A powerful work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation’s earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.
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So great to see the full story after This Land pod
- By S. Armor on 04-12-25
By: Rebecca Nagle
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Agent Zo
- The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter
- By: Clare Mulley
- Narrated by: Kristin Atherton, Clare Mulley
- Length: 13 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
During World War II, Elzbieta Zawacka—the WWII female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo—was the only woman to reach London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces, known as the "Silent Unseen." She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then she was the only female member of these forces to be parachuted back behind enemy lines to Nazi-occupied Poland.
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Agent Zo
- By Cam on 03-05-25
By: Clare Mulley
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A Thousand Threads
- A Memoir
- By: Neneh Cherry
- Narrated by: Neneh Cherry
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Born in Sweden in 1964, Neneh Cherry’s father Ahmadu was a musician from Sierra Leone. Her mother, Moki, was a twenty-one-year-old Swedish textile artist. Her parents split up just after Neneh was born, and not long afterwards Moki met and fell in love with acclaimed jazz musician Don Cherry. Eventually, the strong pull New York City in the 1970s drew him them there, but they made a home wherever they traveled. Neneh and her brother Eagle-Eye experienced a life of creativity, freedom, and, of course, music.
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I Wanted to Love This Book
- By kf smith on 04-09-25
By: Neneh Cherry
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My Name Is Lucy Barton
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Strout
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself.
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Because we all love imperfectly.
- By Bonny on 01-15-16
By: Elizabeth Strout
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All Fours
- A Novel
- By: Miranda July
- Narrated by: Miranda July
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman.
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would not recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-24
By: Miranda July
Sad, disgusting and not an intelligible metaphor
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