Etta and Otto and Russell and James Audiobook By Emma Hooper cover art

Etta and Otto and Russell and James

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Etta and Otto and Russell and James

By: Emma Hooper
Narrated by: Robert G. Slade
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About this listen

LONGLISTED FOR CANADA READS 2025

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is incredibly moving, beautifully written and luminous with wisdom. It is a book that restores one's faith in life even as it deepens its mystery. Wonderful!”—Chris Cleave, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Little Bee

“I've gone. I've never seen the water, so I've gone there. I will try to remember to come back.”

Etta's greatest unfulfilled wish, living in the rolling farmland of Saskatchewan, is to see the sea. And so, at the age of eighty-two she gets up very early one morning, takes a rifle, some chocolate, and her best boots, and begins walking the 2,000 miles to water.

Meanwhile her husband Otto waits patiently at home, left only with his memories. Their neighbour Russell remembers too, but differently—and he still loves Etta as much as he did more than fifty years ago, before she married Otto.

Etta and Otto and Russell and James is a love story that spans fifty years, three lives, two continents and an ocean. It is a story of love and joy, pain and passion, memory and forgetting—and one incredible journey.

©2015 Emma Hooper, Ltd. (P)2025 Penguin Canada

Critic reviews

Winner of the 2017 Frank Hegyi Award for Emerging Authors

Chosen as London’s One Book One London 2017 read

“Magical... such wonderfully assured storytelling: it's been a very long time since a book has taken me by the hand - and the heart - as this one has.”—Sarah Winman, international bestselling author of When God Was a Rabbit

“A fan of Audrey Niffenegger and Alice Munro, Hooper's sense of playfulness comes across in the book's gentle magical realism.”—The Observer (UK)

“Charming, sweet...there is a singing simplicity that cuts through to the heart of things...fresh and touching.”—Sunday Times (UK)

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