Dreams Before the Start of Time
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Narrated by:
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Susan Duerden
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Derek Perkins
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By:
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Anne Charnock
About this listen
In a near-future London, Millie Dack places her hand on her belly to feel her baby kick, resolute in her decision to be a single parent. Across town, her closest friend - a hungover Toni Munroe - steps into the shower and places her hand on a medic console. The diagnosis is devastating.
In this stunning, bittersweet family saga, Millie and Toni experience the aftershocks of human progress as their children and grandchildren embrace new ways of making babies. When infertility is a thing of the past, a man can create a child without a woman, a woman can create a child without a man, and artificial wombs eliminate the struggles of pregnancy. But what does it mean to be a parent? A child? A family?
Through a series of interconnected vignettes that spans five generations and three continents, this emotionally taut story explores the anxieties that arise when the science of fertility claims to deliver all the answers.
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In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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The Perfect Lie
- By: Emily Barr
- Narrated by: Jilly Bond, Penelope Rawlins, Julia Franklin
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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For Lucy Riddick, Venice has always been the dream destination, the ideal place to lose herself. And now she needs to do just that. The secret she's been keeping has finally caught up with her and Lucy needs to disappear - fast. But what if, when she sets foot in Venice, Lucy finds the one thing she has been running from?
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Fun and Absorbing
- By Jen Griffin on 10-15-15
By: Emily Barr
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The Lost Girls of Ireland
- Starlight Cottages, Book 1
- By: Susanne O'Leary
- Narrated by: Jennifer Fitzgerald
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A heart-warming story about family secrets and one woman’s escape to dreamy Sandy Cove on the stunning west coast of Ireland. The picturesque beach of Wild Rose Bay is the last place Lydia Butler thought she’d be. But having just lost everything, the run-down cottage she inherited from her Great Aunt Nellie is the only place she can take her daughter, Sunny. Hidden away in a tiny Irish village, she can protect Sunny from the gossip in Dublin, and the real reason they have nowhere else to live....
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Great Read
- By Mary k.campbell on 12-02-22
By: Susanne O'Leary
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The Mum Who’d Had Enough
- By: Fiona Gibson, Nigel Pilkington
- Narrated by: Paul Tyreman, Rachael Louise Miller, Sara Poyzer, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Nate Turner has a nice life. He has a steady job as a driving examiner and lives with his wife, Sinead, and son, Flynn, in a lovely house in a good part of town. Yes, it’s a very nice life. Until one morning Nate comes downstairs to find Sinead gone and a note lying on the kitchen table, listing all the many things that Nate does wrong - or doesn’t do at all.
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Wrong title, but great story!!
- By Laurie on 05-21-19
By: Fiona Gibson, and others
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The Forgotten Secret
- By: Kathleen McGurl
- Narrated by: Melanie MacHugh
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s the summer of 1919, and Ellen O’Brien has her whole life ahead of her. Young, in love and leaving home for her first job, the future seems full of shining possibility. But war is brewing, and before long, Ellen and everyone around her are swept up by it. As Ireland is torn apart by the turmoil, Ellen finds herself facing the ultimate test of love and loyalty. A hundred years later and Clare Farrell has inherited a dilapidated old farmhouse in County Meath.
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The Forgotten Secret
- By Amazon Customer on 08-31-20
By: Kathleen McGurl
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Hello from the Gillespies
- By: Monica McInerney
- Narrated by: Ulli Birvé
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past 33 years, Angela Gillespie has sent to friends and family around the world an end-of-the-year letter titled ‘Hello from the Gillespies’. It’s always been cheery and full of good news. This year, Angela surprises herself - she tells the truth....
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Engaging
- By mgn on 08-18-15
By: Monica McInerney
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The Scent of You
- By: Maggie Alderson
- Narrated by: Zara Ramm
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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A tale of perfumes, exploring life, love, loss and forgiveness - Maggie Alderson's new best seller. Are you still married if you haven't seen your husband for months? Polly's life is great. Her children are away at uni, her glamorous mother - still modelling at 85 - is happily settled in a retirement village, and her perfume blog is taking off. Then her husband announces he needs some space and promptly vanishes. As Polly grapples with her bewildering situation, she clings to a few new friends to keep her going.
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Okay for a light read
- By Robin on 10-26-17
By: Maggie Alderson
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Make or Break
- By: Catherine Bennetto
- Narrated by: Anna Acton
- Length: 11 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Jess, a 29-year-old Londoner with a Kate Beckett fringe and a tendency for dramatics, gets taken on a surprise trip by her long-term boyfriend, Pete, to attend her best friend’s last-minute wedding in South Africa. Jess imagines sun, sand, wine and safaris. And returning to London with an ethically mined diamond on her left hand... But this holiday isn’t set to be quite the fairy tale Jess has planned. Suddenly she finds her world tilting on its axis, and things are only set to get worse when Jess returns home....
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Excruciating. Save yourself.
- By Kristyn Rose on 05-11-19
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A Study in Charlotte
- Charlotte Holmes, Book 1
- By: Brittany Cavallaro
- Narrated by: Graham Halstead, Julia Whelan
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Jamie Watson has always been intrigued by Charlotte Holmes; after all, their great-great-great-grandfathers were one of the most infamous pairs in history. But the Holmes family has always been odd, and Charlotte is no exception. She's inherited Sherlock's volatility and some of his vices - and when Jamie and Charlotte end up at the same Connecticut boarding school, Charlotte makes it clear she's not looking for friends.
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3.5 ☆s
- By Ashley C on 01-21-18
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Spring at Lavender Bay
- Lavender Bay, Book 1
- By: Sarah Bennett
- Narrated by: Rachel Bavidge
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Beth Reynolds loved growing up close to Eleanor's Emporium – a bric-a-brac shop full of wonders on Lavender Bay. Devastated to learn that Eleanor has died, she returns home from London immediately and is shocked to discover that the elderly lady has left the shop to her! Vowing to restore it to its former glory, she only intends to stay until the end of the season. Although the longer she spends in the colourful seaside town, the more she falls back in love with everything she left behind... and quite possibly, with her best friend Eliza's older brother, local chef Sam Barnes!
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The Story Was Soooooo Slow
- By VICTORIA E PRALL on 04-26-24
By: Sarah Bennett
What listeners say about Dreams Before the Start of Time
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- William Dwan
- 01-09-19
No drive. No arc. No spark.
A collection of broadly connected needle drops in people’s lives. Well crafted and touching, but conflicted in its methods. It’s only obliquely science fiction. Perhaps , it’s the message that people’s motives are unchanging, even as they adapt to new technology. Fine, but this book lacks tension; creates no burden to care what happens to several generations of characters.
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- The Yawning Horror
- 01-05-21
Unlistenable. May as well have a robot read to you
Duerden's robotic narration was rather fitting for 'A Calculated Life' but I just can't bear it here. Every time I've tried to listen to this I've wondered if I'm listening to a person or a synthesized TTS voice, because I swear my GPS nav has more character. It's not just monotonous, but all done in the most offputting British accent where every vowel is drawn out (think "draaawwings").
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- NMwritergal
- 04-22-17
Read A Calculated Life instead
The emotional distance you feel from the main character in that novel makes sense, and it was a quite unique book. But this novel is about people having/creating babies, forming families, and how thoughts, norms, and technology surrounding the two change over five generations. But Charnock, I think, is a little more interested in ideas and concepts than character development. And since this spans five generations in seven hours, there are way too many to characters to fully develop them and to keep them completely straight (it would be easier reading than listening). So I didn’t really connect with any of them emotionally.
Still, I was engaged enough to keep listening (on 1.25 speed). The writing was solid as was the audio narration.
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7 people found this helpful