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Getting Mother's Body
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Suzan-Lori Parks
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
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Publisher's summary
As Willa Mae's only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother's substantial but unconfirmed fortune - a cache of jewels that Willa Mae's lover, Dill Smiles, is said to have buried with her. Dirt poor, living in a trailer with her Aunt June and Uncle Roosevelt behind a gas station in a tumbleweedy Texas town, and pregnant with an illegitimate child, Billy knows that treasure could mean salvation. So she steals Dill's pickup truck and, with her aunt and uncle in tow, heads for Arizona with Dill in hot pursuit. While everyone agrees it's only polite to speak of getting mother's body and moving her to a proper resting place, it's well understood that digging up Willa Mae's diamonds and pearls will make the whole trip a lot more worthwhile.
The enormously accomplished fiction debut from Suzan-Lori Parks, the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Getting Mother's Body takes its place in the company of the classic works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. But when it comes to an ingenious, uproarious knack for depicting the trifling, hard-luck, down-and-out souls who need a little singing and laughing and lying and praying to get through the day, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no one.
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Story
Miss Julia, a recently bereaved and newly wealthy widow, is only slightly bemused when one Hazel Marie Puckett appears at her door with a youngster in tow and unceremoniously announces that the child is the bastard son of Miss Julia's late husband. Suddenly, this longtime church member and pillar of her small Southern community finds herself in the center of an unseemly scandal - and the guardian of a wan nine-year-old whose mere presence turns her life upside down.
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Miss Julia is 60+ yrs old.. reader is too young
- By jennifer on 07-13-12
By: Ann B. Ross
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Fallen Angels
- By: Patricia Hickman
- Narrated by: John McDonough
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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During the Great Depression, Jeb Nubey is running from the law when he meets three abandoned children. With nowhere else to go the group passes a stormy night in a comforting church. When they are discovered, a case of mistaken identity ensues. It seems the congregation has been waiting for their new pastor, a widower with three kids. Looks like more trouble for Jeb. Yet the chance for a steady job and three squares a day is too good to turn down.
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Touching
- By Christina on 11-11-04
By: Patricia Hickman
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The Sweet By and By
- A Novel
- By: Todd Johnson
- Narrated by: Becky Ann Baker, Adriane Lenox, Robin Miles, and others
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Among the longleaf pines and family farms of eastern North Carolina, days seem to pass without incident for Margaret Clayton and Bernice Stokes until they discover each other in a friendship that will take them on the most important journey of their lives. Margaret, droll and whip smart, has a will of iron that never fails her even when her body does, while Bernice, an avid country-music fan, is rarely lucid.
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Great 2/3 of a book.
- By Tracy on 07-09-12
By: Todd Johnson
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Devil in a Blue Dress
- An Easy Rawlins Mystery
- By: Walter Mosley
- Narrated by: Michael Boatman
- Length: 5 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.
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Beware of Mysterious Sexy Women with Big Suitcases
- By Jefferson on 02-13-11
By: Walter Mosley
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This Dark Road to Mercy
- A Novel
- By: Wiley Cash
- Narrated by: Jenna Lamia, Erik Bergmann, Scott Sowers
- Length: 7 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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This Dark Road to Mercy is a tale of love and atonement, blood and vengeance, a story that involves two young sisters, a wayward father, and an enemy determined to see him pay for his sins. When their mother dies unexpectedly, twelve-year-old Easter Quillby and her six-year-old sister, Ruby, are shuffled into the foster care system in Gastonia, North Carolina, a little town not far from the Appalachian Mountains. But just as they settle into their new life, their errant father, Wade, an ex-minor-league baseball player whom they haven't seen in years, suddenly reappears and steals them away in the middle of the night.
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Easter offers chance at redemption; but no spark
- By W Perry Hall on 01-31-14
By: Wiley Cash
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Wise Blood
- By: Flannery O’Connor
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Flannery O’Connor’s astonishing and haunting first novel is a classic of 20th-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a 22-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his innate, desperate faith. He falls under the spell of a “blind” street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Hazel founds The Church of God Without Christ but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God.
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Grotesque Southern Gothic Masterpiece
- By Darwin8u on 10-18-12
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The Wayward Bus
- By: John Steinbeck, Gary Schamhorst - introduction
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.
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Steinbeck always touches the heart, makes you feel
- By Kelly on 05-08-17
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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Mudbound
- By: Hillary Jordan
- Narrated by: Ezra Knight, Kate Forbes, Joseph Collins, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.
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May this South never rise again.
- By Betty on 03-25-12
By: Hillary Jordan
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Where I'm Calling From
- Selected Stories
- By: Raymond Carver
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story. Where I'm Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.
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Love Carver, But Dietz Ruins It With Reading
- By Noirbat on 05-10-18
By: Raymond Carver
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Ellen Foster
- By: Kaye Gibbons
- Narrated by: Ruth Ann Phimister
- Length: 3 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy. I would figure out this or that way and run it down through my head until it got easy." So begins the tale of Ellen Foster, the brave and engaging heroine of Kaye Gibbons's first novel, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wise, funny, affectionate and true, Ellen Foster is, as Walker Percy called it, "The real thing. Which is to say, a lovely, sometimes heart/wrenching novel...."
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Great!!
- By Jo on 04-06-18
By: Kaye Gibbons
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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The Other Side of Paradise
- A Memoir
- By: Staceyann Chin
- Narrated by: Staceyann Chin
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Stacyann Chin has appeared on television and radio, including The Oprah Winfrey Show , CNN, and PBS, discussing issues of race and sexuality. But it is her extraordinary voice that launched her career as a performer, poet, and activist. Here, she shares her unforgettable story of triumph against all odds in this brave and fiercely candid memoir.
No one knew Staceyann's mother was pregnant until a dangerously small baby was born on the floor of her grandmother's house in Jamaica, on Christmas Day.
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Incredible life, incredible performer
- By RyRy on 10-21-19
By: Staceyann Chin
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Gloria
- By: Kerry Young
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within.
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Awesome story! And Robin Miles is a star!!
- By atlfolk on 06-23-18
By: Kerry Young
What listeners say about Getting Mother's Body
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Diana
- 07-22-03
This is what audible is meant to be
Occasionally I listen to a book that I feel is made immensely more enjoyable by being heard as compared to being read. This is one such book. Suzan-Lori Parks has written an excellent book and has acted as an exceptional narrator/singer.
For those just wanting an interesting story, this book has that. I was very curious as to how the author was going to resolve the conflicts in the book, and I was not disappointed. If you like character sketches, you will be delighted in this book. Even if the story had not been interesting, I would have been immensely pleased just to listen to each of her characters speak. If you are a literary person and love a story uniquely told with layers to be explored, this book will interest you as well -- after all Getting Mother's Body does require some digging. I think it would be a great book for a group discussion!
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Andrew
- 07-30-03
Just a warning...
Just so you aren't surprised (as I was), the entire book, other than the singing, is narrated in the first person by the author as a variety of poor, southern black folk in the early 1960's. It is humorous, and the diiference in point of view between the older characters and younger characters, particularly as to the evolving racial and social issues of the time, is quite interesting. At first I was somewhat put off by the narrative style, but it grew on me as I came to know the characters' personalities.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Barbara
- 11-15-03
Interesting
I enjoyed this audiobook very much. The characters were very interesting and the narration was excellent.
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Overall
- Paula Beck
- 10-23-03
Enjoyable
I enjoyed this one...it felt like a priveleged insight into the lives of people so different from myself. The main character's "matter-of-fact" attitude toward her unfortunate circumstances somehow inspired me. I like anything that helps me expand my attitudes.
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Overall
- Martha
- 04-19-05
Great characters!
this was a fun, fun book. I just love picturing in my mind these wackey people
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Overall
- Jacob
- 03-11-05
Beautiful, heart-wrenching, subtle
I can't understand the narrow-mindedness of some of the reviews above. This is not John Grisham or Danielle Steele. This is equisitely-written, subtle and beautiful character portraits and a fully-realized, 3-dimensional plot with real lives and real people. Don't expect an action flick or a cheesy romance. There's a reason she won the Pullitzer Prize.
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Overall
- Barbara
- 07-25-03
Good Read
What a good book to listen to. I usually listen at work but this time I burned CD's and listened in the car. I could have done without the singing in it but I guess it added to the story. The story line was good, the characters believable. Poor Bille Beede! I felt for her and her life and wanted so much for her to have something good happen to her. I guess you will have to listen and find out in the end if Bille does get a better shake out of life!
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall
- James
- 07-11-03
Very Good.
My first audible book and was very satisfied.The story is well read and interesting.It's a real good mix of humor and drama.The pacing is good,I never lost interest.
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1 person found this helpful
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- C
- 11-08-17
Suzan-Lori parks a Great American writer
every piece of suzan-lori parks writing feels like a missing page in the history book that was buried and has been resurrected and brought to life. getting mother's body is no exception. I am always amazed by her typical deft characterization and ability to convey the drama inherent in the daily lives of her characters and the peoples they represent. suzan-lori parks and this piece should be mandatory reading for any Young American.
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Overall
- Laura
- 01-12-04
Well crafted
This is a well crafted first novel from Pulitzer-prize winning Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks does her own narration and singing (with her husband on guitar), which adds a great theatricality to this audiobook.
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