Diamond Head
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nancy Wu
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Samantha Chen
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Angela Lin
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Janet Song
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Emily Woo Zeller
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By:
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Cecily Wong
About this listen
Diamond Head is a sweeping debut from a young, powerful new voice in fiction that follows four generations of a wealthy shipping family whose rise and decline is riddled with secrets and tragic love.
At the turn of the 19th century, Frank Leong, a fabulously wealthy shipping industrialist, moves his family from China to the island of Oahu. But something ancient follows the Leongs to Hawaii, haunting them. The fabled red string of fate, the cord that binds intended lovers, also punishes mistakes in love, passing a destructive knot down the family line.
When Frank Leong is murdered, his family is thrown into a perilous downward spiral. Left to rebuild in their patriarch's shadow, the surviving members of the Leong family try their hand at a new, ordinary life, vowing to bury their gilded past. Still, the island continues to whisper fragments of truth and chatter until a letter arrives two decades later, carrying a shattering confession.
Now the Leongs' survival rests with young Theresa, Frank Leong's only grandchild, 18 and pregnant, the heir apparent to her ancestors' punishing knots.
Told through the eyes of the Leongs' secret-keeping daughters and wives and spanning the Boxer Rebellion to Pearl Harbor to 1960s Hawaii, Diamond Head is a breathtakingly powerful tale of tragic love, shocking lies, poignant compromise, aching loss, heroic acts of sacrifice, and miraculous hope.
©2015 Cecily Wong (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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The daughter of a poor baker in rural Bengal, India, Sabitri yearns to get an education, but her family's situation means college is an impossible dream. Then an influential woman from Kolkata takes Sabitri under her wing, but her generosity soon proves dangerous after the girl makes a single unforgivable misstep. Years later, Sabitri's own daughter, Bela, haunted by her mother's choices, flees abroad with her political refugee lover - but the America she finds is vastly different from the country she'd imagined.
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Absolutely Worth a Credit
- By Texastanya on 08-27-16
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When the Moon Is Low
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Sneha Mathan, Neil Shah
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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The Beach Trees
- By: Karen White
- Narrated by: Ki Gottberg, Gin Hammond
- Length: 15 hrs and 6 mins
- Abridged
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For Julie Holt, travelling to the beautiful but ravaged coast of Biloxi, Mississippi, is a journey into a secret past, and a life she never expected.... Julie first knew loss at the age of 12, when her sister disappeared, never to be found. As her once close-knit family grew apart, Julie's mother obsessively searched for the girl, and when her mother died, Julie took up the search, never letting go of the hope. Then, at an art exhibition in New York, she meets Monica....
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The ending was very weak
- By Missi Boyd on 10-31-16
By: Karen White
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Love Walked In
- By: Marisa de los Santos
- Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning poet Marisa de los Santos crafts an irresistibly touching debut novel. Love Walked In is a contemporary tale, steeped in nostalgic, cinematic charm, of love in all its forms. Unapologetically idealistic about love, Cornelia Brown appears to catch the break of a lifetime when the dashing Martin Grace, her own personal Cary Grant, comes strolling into her life. But it is Martin's connection to 11-year-old Clare Hobbes that touches Cornelia's heart in ways she never imagined.
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Dreadful audio quality
- By Marenghi on 09-16-11
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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When It Happens to You
- A Novel in Stories
- By: Molly Ringwald
- Narrated by: Molly Ringwald
- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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When it happens to you, you will be surprised. That thing they say about how you knew all the time, but just weren't facing it? That might be the case, but nevertheless, there you will be. Molly Ringwald mines the complexities of modern relationships in this gripping and nuanced collection of interlinked stories. Writing with a deep compassion for human imperfection, Ringwald follows a Los Angeles family and their friends and neighbors while they negotiate the hazardous terrain of everyday life - revealing the deceptions, heartbreak, and vulnerability familiar to us all.
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Narrated by Molly!
- By JillHen on 03-01-13
By: Molly Ringwald
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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Hum If You Don't Know the Words
- By: Bianca Marais
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.
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Completely wrong accents
- By Debbie on 02-12-22
By: Bianca Marais
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A Golden Age
- A Novel
- By: Tahmima Anam
- Narrated by: Madhur Jaffrey
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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As young widow Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming, her children are almost grown, and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air.
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sad, poignant, thought-provoking, beautiful
- By Rio Delta Wild on 06-04-08
By: Tahmima Anam
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The Orphan Keeper
- By: Camron Wright
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven-year-old Chellamuthu's life - and his destiny - is forever changed when he is kidnapped from his village in Southern India and sold to the Lincoln Home for Homeless Children. His family is desperate to find him, and Chellamuthu anxiously tells the Indian orphanage that he is not an orphan, he has a mother who loves him. But he is told not to worry, he will soon be adopted by a loving family in America.
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5 Star Worthy
- By Kari on 10-26-16
By: Camron Wright
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The Invisible Circus
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Madeleine Lambert
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation.
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Too bad zero was not a choice...
- By IVAL on 04-28-13
By: Jennifer Egan
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (Unabridged Selections)
- By: Edited by David Sedaris
- Narrated by: David Sedaris, Mary-Louise Parker, Cherry Jones
- Length: 2 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
What listeners say about Diamond Head
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- RoamingGypsy
- 04-28-16
Great
Leaves you wanting more of the tale. I am very glad that I took a chance on this title.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Jodi
- 12-07-16
Lame ending
The book was great but I was so disappointed with the ending. It ended kind of abruptly, leaving several stories within hanging.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Jennifer Wheatly
- 03-18-24
Good story about early Hawaii
The only problem I had with the story was the mispronunciation of places and things pertaining to Hawaii. As somebody from Hawaii, it was like nails on a chalkboard.
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- LBR
- 08-25-20
Disappointed Island Girl
When you choose to set your story in an exotic location like Hawaii and use the Island language and as part of the descriptive text you also have a responsibility to pronounce the words correctly. I counted at least 5 times words were pronounced wrong. It labeled the writer as a tourist, not a Kamaaina.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Gina
- 09-06-15
.
what an emotional roller coaster. there were times I was lost on who was who but I really enjoyed this book. from laughing to crying this book had me hooked!
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7 people found this helpful
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- JDF
- 12-29-20
Too Sad
I enjoyed the historical aspect of this book but I wish I hadn't read it. I don't like sad depressing books. it was assigned for bookclub or I wouldn't have finished it. the performance was excellent and it was well written.
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- Sarah
- 08-12-16
meh
What aspect of the narrators’s performance would you have changed?
The narrators did a great job with what they were given to work with. none of my issues are with the narrators.
Any additional comments?
meh.
While I appreciate having multiple perspectives in novels, it wasn’t used to the best effect in Diamond Head. It was completely unnecessary to have the chauffeur’s point of view start out the story and pop up in different spots. It added nothing to the story. The story was so disjointed that I had trouble connecting with the characters. There was no forward momentum. Each character’s motivations were always revealed much too late in the story, well after I had stopped really caring or moved on. Parts of the story, usually what was happening ‘currently’ dragged on, but the parts of the story that I found really intriguing, Hong’s story and Theresa, were given almost no time or was smushed in at the end. I know the story was focused on the Leong women’s point of view but I wanted to know more of the character of Bohai/Maku. I don’t necessarily want him to be added as a narrator, but just knowing a bit more of his character would have added added quite a bit to the story. Some of the choices that the characters make just didn’t make sense to me. Like when Lin, who was sold to her husband Frank by her father at a very young age, buys a 14 year old concubine to produce a male baby then treats the girl like shit. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t have to particularly *like* any of the characters a book to love the book, but you have to at least understand and empathize with that disliked character for it to work. And I just don’t get it, I don’t feel connected with any particular character. The family drama was such that I *kinda* wanted to know what was going to happen, but I didn’t *have* to know. Like glancing through a People magazine at the doctor’s office. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had been reading it slowly over a month or so, reading a chapter or two then putting it down for a week. But honestly, I think I wouldn’t have picked it back up ever.
There are some beautifully written passages and overall the writing itself is ok. Not great, but good. I enjoyed the descriptions of Chinese and Hawaiian culture and traditions. I feel like I would enjoy Cecily Wong’s writing more in a different format, maybe short stories rather than a novel. Honestly if this book had been arranged as each woman’s (and other characters also) perspective as a stand alone short story, I would have been inthralled.
I was going to give it 3 stars because it was just ok, but I didn’t dislike it. Then I got to the ending. It was just so completely unsatisfactory. The big reveal happened, but was wholly predictable. There was no catharsis and really no wrapping up. I think I would have been better off just stopping the audiobook with 2 hours left then finishing it. 2 stars it is.
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1 person found this helpful