
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 Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides, the United Nations comes calling, offering an opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS-affiliated women held in Iraqi refugee camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup, Nadia leaps at the chance. In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head.
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Interesting premise but the execution is hit and miss
- By Patrick Bogart on 03-23-25
By: Nussaibah Younis
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Nesting
- A Novel
- By: Roisín O'Donnell
- Narrated by: Louisa Harland
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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On a bright spring afternoon, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes off the clothesline, she straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe—and that this time, when she leaves, she must stay away. On the surface, she has a perfect life: her husband, Ryan, is a good provider, sometimes even kind and attentive, from a nice Irish family, and they have another baby on the way.
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Loved the book - very well written
- By Weezie on 03-26-25
By: Roisín O'Donnell
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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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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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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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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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Woodworking
- By: Emily St. James
- Narrated by: L. Morgan Lee, Saoirse Ní Shúilleabháin, Emily St. James
- Length: 12 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.
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Well told story
- By Lisa on 03-23-25
By: Emily St. James
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Dream Count
- A Novel
- By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Narrated by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sandra Okuboyejo, A'rese Emokpae, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship.
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Interesting
- By NYD8181 on 03-28-25
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Back After This
- A Novel
- By: Linda Holmes
- Narrated by: Linda Holmes
- Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Cecily Foster loves to make podcasts. She fiercely protects her colleagues, dearly adores her friends, and never misses dinner with her sister. But after a disastrous relationship with a colleague who stole her heart and her ideas, she’s put romantic love on hold. When the boss who’s disappointed her again and again finally offers her the chance to host her own show, she wants to be thrilled. But there’s a catch—actually, two catches. First, the show will be about Cecily’s dating life.
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Narration added to the story
- By Rose V. on 03-10-25
By: Linda Holmes
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The River Has Roots
- By: Amal El-Mohtar
- Narrated by: Gem Carmella
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family. There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees. But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk…
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Rich and lush and ode to language and love
- By Joella Berkner on 03-22-25
By: Amal El-Mohtar
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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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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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Creation Lake
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Kushner
- Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A thirty-four-year-old American woman—a secret agent—is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct.
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Author should not have been the reader
- By Raj A. on 09-11-24
By: Rachel Kushner
What listeners say about Crooked Seeds
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- april
- 04-23-24
Sad, disgusting and not an intelligible metaphor
A failed metaphor for South Africa. Utterly disgusting characters except the police investigator. The NYT suggested this was a metaphor for post apartheid South Africa. Really? The primary female characters were either ignorant, delusional or drunk. I finished it waiting for redemption or Godot. Got neither. Save yourself and read Nadine Gordimer.
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