
Gliff
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $16.00
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Eliot Sumner
-
By:
-
Ali Smith
About this listen
From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world. Add two children. And a horse.
From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
©2025 Ali Smith (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
-
Theory & Practice
- By: Michelle de Kretser
- Narrated by: Melissa Madden Gray
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.
-
We Do Not Part
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.
-
-
Powerful, Tough Listen
- By ncnickle on 01-26-25
By: Han Kang, and others
-
Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
-
-
Bizarre
- By Kevin on 04-23-25
By: Katie Kitamura
-
Taiwan Travelogue
- A Novel
- By: Yang Shuang-Zi, Lin King - translator
- Narrated by: Sarah Skaer
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine.
-
-
Audiobook heavily abridged--do not buy
- By David S. on 04-17-25
By: Yang Shuang-Zi, and others
-
The Antidote
- A Novel
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell comes a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories.
-
-
1935 Nebraska Dustbowl drama with a Supernatural twist.
- By CarolynL on 03-16-25
By: Karen Russell
-
Stone Yard Devotional
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
-
-
A profound inward journey
- By Kathlene barrett on 02-17-25
By: Charlotte Wood
-
Theory & Practice
- By: Michelle de Kretser
- Narrated by: Melissa Madden Gray
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.
-
We Do Not Part
- A Novel
- By: Han Kang, E. Yaewon - translator, Paige Aniyah Morris - translator
- Narrated by: Greta Jung
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step.
-
-
Powerful, Tough Listen
- By ncnickle on 01-26-25
By: Han Kang, and others
-
Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day–partner, parent, creator, muse–and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
-
-
Bizarre
- By Kevin on 04-23-25
By: Katie Kitamura
-
Taiwan Travelogue
- A Novel
- By: Yang Shuang-Zi, Lin King - translator
- Narrated by: Sarah Skaer
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste its authentic cuisine.
-
-
Audiobook heavily abridged--do not buy
- By David S. on 04-17-25
By: Yang Shuang-Zi, and others
-
The Antidote
- A Novel
- By: Karen Russell
- Narrated by: Elena Rey, Sophie Amoss, Mark Bramhall, and others
- Length: 16 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell comes a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories.
-
-
1935 Nebraska Dustbowl drama with a Supernatural twist.
- By CarolynL on 03-16-25
By: Karen Russell
-
Stone Yard Devotional
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
-
-
A profound inward journey
- By Kathlene barrett on 02-17-25
By: Charlotte Wood
-
Twist
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.
-
-
So happy he’s still writing fiction
- By Franki on 03-31-25
By: Colum McCann
-
Companion Piece
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Natalie Simpson
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With an eye for rendering the timely in a timeless way and enchanting audiences with lyrical prose and grace, Ali Smith's ambitious Seasonal Quartet—a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected—artfully guided us through #MeToo, Brexit, the refugee crisis, a global pandemic, and more. Now, Smith's highly anticipated Companion Piece looks to the future and builds upon this "time-sensitive project". This new novel stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself.
-
-
She said she said she said
- By Cate on 05-29-22
By: Ali Smith
-
Universality
- A Novel
- By: Natasha Brown
- Narrated by: Norma Butikofer, Anushka Chakravarti, Clare Corbett, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar. An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic newspaper columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm. She solves the mystery, but her viral exposé raises more questions than it answers.
By: Natasha Brown
-
Held
- A Novel
- By: Anne Michaels
- Narrated by: Anne Michaels
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
-
-
Would give six stars if possible
- By love it on 08-31-24
By: Anne Michaels
-
Parade
- A Novel
- By: Rachel Cusk
- Narrated by: Genevieve Gaunt
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success. In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas. At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.
-
-
Incomprehensible biologically-essentialist nonsense
- By Lu Clark on 03-15-25
By: Rachel Cusk
-
Theft
- A Novel
- By: Abdulrazak Gurnah
- Narrated by: Ashley Zhangazha
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the turn of the twenty-first century, three young people come of age in Tanzania. Karim returns to his sleepy hometown after university with new swagger and ambition. Fauzia glimpses in him a chance at escape from a smothering upbringing. The two of them offer a haven to Badar, a poor boy still unsure if the future holds anything for him at all. As tourism, technology, and unexpected opportunities and perils reach their quiet corner of the world, bringing, each arrives at a different understanding of what it means to take your fate into your own hands.
-
-
Bader
- By Paul on 03-21-25
-
Playworld
- A Novel
- By: Adam Ross
- Narrated by: Adam Ross
- Length: 22 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
-
-
Is it over yet?
- By Brady9876543 on 01-14-25
By: Adam Ross
-
Tilt
- A Novel
- By: Emma Pattee
- Narrated by: Ariel Blake
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.
-
-
Over enthusiastic, snarky narrator who can't...
- By NMwritergal on 03-27-25
By: Emma Pattee
-
Good Girl
- A Novel
- By: Aria Aber
- Narrated by: Mozhan Navabi
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Berlin’s artistic underground, where techno and drugs fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan parents, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. Then in the haze of Berlin’s legendary nightlife, Nila meets Marlowe, an American writer whose fading literary celebrity opens her eyes to a life of freedom.
-
-
Rebel, Rebel
- By Suzanna on 02-17-25
By: Aria Aber
-
Eurotrash
- A Novel
- By: Christian Kracht, Daniel Bowles - translator
- Narrated by: Kevin Kemp
- Length: 4 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.
-
-
I loved the interaction between mother and son
- By BBWrighter on 03-05-25
By: Christian Kracht, and others
-
Sister Europe
- A Novel
- By: Nell Zink
- Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she’s unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she’s reduced to begging the ancient award winner to find some attendees at the last minute. Masud invites his old friend Demian, a native Berliner, who in turn invites his two best friends.
-
-
a look into such a different world.
- By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro on 05-15-25
By: Nell Zink
-
On the Calculation of Volume, Book I
- By: Solvej Balle
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Liang
- Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin?
-
-
The Perfect Book
- By Severian on 02-16-25
By: Solvej Balle
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
-
-
Incredible use of language
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
-
Like
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Lois Chimimba
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma—a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by. And then there is Ash, a fiery Scottish actresss who cannot shake her demons—chief among them an unrequited passion for Amy that has obsessed her ever since they met as teenagers.
By: Ali Smith
-
How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
-
-
Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
-
Summer
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Juliette Burton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
-
-
terrific book, beautifully read.
- By Sasha on 02-07-21
By: Ali Smith
-
Punished
- By: Ann-Helén Laestadius
- Narrated by: Jade Wheeler
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is the early 1950s in the Arctic Circle, and once they turn seven years old, Else-Maj, Jon-Ante, Anne-Risten, Marge, and Nilsa are taken from their families. As decreed by the Swedish state, these children of reindeer herders must attend a Sámi “nomad school,” run by vicious headmistress Rita Olsson, where they are not only stripped of their culture and language, but also physically, verbally, and psychologically abused. As the children are only allowed to return home sporadically, their parents know little of how their children are mistreated, and those who dare to speak up are silenced.
-
Hotel World
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Lois Chimimba, Roy McMillan, Katie Leung, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
By: Ali Smith
-
Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fusing Keatsian mists and mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy, and the color hit of Pop Art, Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, what harvest means.
-
-
Incredible use of language
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
-
Like
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Lois Chimimba
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When we meet Amy Shone, she is a young parent struggling to raise Kate, a precocious eight-year-old. Amy is an enigma—a brilliant scholar who has forgotten how to read. She is estranged from her wealthy English parents and lives a nomadic life in Scotland, dragging Kate from one school to the next, barely scraping by. And then there is Ash, a fiery Scottish actresss who cannot shake her demons—chief among them an unrequited passion for Amy that has obsessed her ever since they met as teenagers.
By: Ali Smith
-
How to Be Both
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: John Banks
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving, genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths, and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real--and all life’s givens get given a second chance.
-
-
Incompetent Foreign Pronunciation
- By J. Kahn on 06-28-15
By: Ali Smith
-
Summer
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Juliette Burton
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Here is the exciting culmination of Ali Smith's celebrated Seasonal Quartet, a series of stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected (as the seasons are), wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories.
-
-
terrific book, beautifully read.
- By Sasha on 02-07-21
By: Ali Smith
-
Punished
- By: Ann-Helén Laestadius
- Narrated by: Jade Wheeler
- Length: 13 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is the early 1950s in the Arctic Circle, and once they turn seven years old, Else-Maj, Jon-Ante, Anne-Risten, Marge, and Nilsa are taken from their families. As decreed by the Swedish state, these children of reindeer herders must attend a Sámi “nomad school,” run by vicious headmistress Rita Olsson, where they are not only stripped of their culture and language, but also physically, verbally, and psychologically abused. As the children are only allowed to return home sporadically, their parents know little of how their children are mistreated, and those who dare to speak up are silenced.
-
Hotel World
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Lois Chimimba, Roy McMillan, Katie Leung, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Five people: four are living; three are strangers; two are sisters; one, a teenage hotel chambermaid, has fallen to her death in a dumbwaiter. But her spirit lingers in the world, straining to recall things she never knew. And one night all five women find themselves in the smooth plush environs of the Global Hotel, where the intersection of their very different fates make for this playful, defiant, and richly inventive novel.
By: Ali Smith
-
The Accidental
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Heather O'Neill, Stina Nielsen, Jeff Woodman, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Barefoot, thirtysomething Amber shows up at the door of a Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. Amber doesn't know them, but she talks her way in, telling lies, and stays for dinner. Eve, an author, thinks Amber is a student her husband is sleeping with. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age 12, thinks she's her mother's friend. Son Magnus, 17, thinks she's an angel.
-
-
Excellent writing, thought provoking
- By L on 03-20-06
By: Ali Smith
-
Stone Yard Devotional
- A Novel
- By: Charlotte Wood
- Narrated by: Ailsa Piper
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
-
-
A profound inward journey
- By Kathlene barrett on 02-17-25
By: Charlotte Wood
-
Companion Piece
- A Novel
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Natalie Simpson
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With an eye for rendering the timely in a timeless way and enchanting audiences with lyrical prose and grace, Ali Smith's ambitious Seasonal Quartet—a series of four stand-alone novels, separate but interconnected—artfully guided us through #MeToo, Brexit, the refugee crisis, a global pandemic, and more. Now, Smith's highly anticipated Companion Piece looks to the future and builds upon this "time-sensitive project". This new novel stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself.
-
-
She said she said she said
- By Cate on 05-29-22
By: Ali Smith
-
Dengue Boy
- A Novel
- By: Michel Nieva
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The protagonist of this story has no understanding of the words winter, cold, or snow because he has never experienced the phenomena they describe. We find ourselves in Victorica, a province of La Pampa, Argentina, some time after 2197–the year in which the last of the Antarctic icecaps melted and an unprecedented climate catastrophe ensued, radically transforming the landscape of the region into a Caribbean Pampas.
-
-
All tell, no show.
- By T. B. Casey on 03-01-25
By: Michel Nieva
-
The Black Orb
- By: Ewhan Kim
- Narrated by: Earl T. Kim
- Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One evening in downtown Seoul, Jeong-su is smoking a cigarette outside when he sees something impossible: a huge black orb appears out of nowhere and sucks his neighbor inside. Jeong-su manages to get away, but the terrifying sphere can move through walls, so he’s sure he won’t be able to hide for long. The orb soon begins consuming every person caught in its path, and no one knows how to stop it. Impervious to bullets and tanks, the orb splits and multiplies, chasing the hapless residents of Seoul out into the country and sparking a global crisis with widespread violence and looting.
By: Ewhan Kim
-
Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.
-
-
#Reality/Loss/Mythology
- By Ellen K. on 11-14-18
By: Ali Smith
-
Brother Brontë
- By: Fernando A. Flores
- Narrated by: Victoria Villarreal
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The year is 2038, and the formerly bustling town of Three Rivers, Texas, is a surreal wasteland. Under the authoritarian thumb of its tech industrialist mayor, Pablo Henry Crick, the town has outlawed reading and forced most of the town’s mothers to work as indentured laborers at the Big Tex Fish Cannery, which poisons the atmosphere and lines Crick’s pockets. Scraping by in this godforsaken landscape are best friends Prosperina and Neftalí—the latter of whom, one of the town’s last literate citizens, hides and reads the books of the mysterious renegade author Jazzmin Monelle Rivas.
-
-
Exuberant, florid, fun
- By M. Locher on 05-08-25
-
Lion
- A Novel
- By: Sonya Walger
- Narrated by: Sonya Walger
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Lion is about an unlikely parent, more legend than presence in his daughter's life. He is a charismatic, dashing bon-vivant, a polo player, race car driver, cocaine addict, ex-con, pilot, and sky-diver. Born in the aftershocks of Argentina's greatest earthquake, he is like a minor god who comes down to earth in a grand manner, falling in all the ways there are to fall.
-
-
Heartachingly beautiful
- By awaw on 05-16-25
By: Sonya Walger
-
Theory & Practice
- By: Michelle de Kretser
- Narrated by: Melissa Madden Gray
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It's 1986, and "beautiful, radical ideas" are in the air. The narrator of Theory & Practice, a young woman originally from Sri Lanka, arrives in Melbourne for graduate school to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In the bohemian neighborhood of St. Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed relationship." They become lovers, and the narrator's feminism comes up against her jealousy. Meanwhile, an entry in Woolf's diary upends what the narrator knows about her literary idol, and throws her own work into disarray.
-
Mutual Interest
- By: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents’ dull, limited life. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants—not least because, more interested in men himself, Oscar will leave Vivian to tend to her own romances with women.
-
We Lived on the Horizon
- A Novel
- By: Erika Swyler
- Narrated by: Shiromi Arserio
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The city of Bulwark is aptly named: a walled city built to protect and preserve the people who managed to survive a series of great cataclysms, Bulwark was founded on a system where sacrifice is rewarded by the AI that runs the city. Saint Enita Malovis feels the end of her life and decades of work as a bio-prosthetist approaching. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix. In the midst of her project, a fellow Sainted is brutally murdered and the city AI inexplicably erases the event from its data.
-
-
So dull that everything went in one ear...
- By NMwritergal on 01-16-25
By: Erika Swyler
-
The Garden
- By: Nick Newman
- Narrated by: Nicolette McKenzie
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a place and time unknown, two elderly sisters live in a walled garden, secluded from the outside world. Evelyn and Lily have only ever known each other. What was before the garden, they have forgotten; what lies beyond it, they do not know. Each day is spent in languid service to their home: tending the bees, planting the crops, and dutifully following the instructions of the almanac written by their mother. So when a nameless boy is found hiding in the boarded house at the center of their isolated grounds, their once solitary lives are irrevocably disrupted.
-
-
Disappointing
- By Susan L. Houser on 03-28-25
By: Nick Newman
excellent book and narration
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
No other author comes close!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
4 hrs I’ll never get back
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I'll never get my time back.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.