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Go Set a Watchman
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Reese Witherspoon
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
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Publisher's summary
Performed by Reese Witherspoon
Number one New York Times best seller
“Go Set a Watchman is such an important book, perhaps the most important novel on race to come out of the white South in decades." (New York Times)
A landmark novel by Harper Lee, set two decades after her beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch - “Scout” - returns home to Maycomb, Alabama from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise’s homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town, and the people dearest to her.
Memories from her childhood flood back, and her values and assumptions are thrown into doubt. Featuring many of the iconic characters from To Kill a Mockingbird, Go Set a Watchman perfectly captures a young woman, and a world, in painful yet necessary transition out of the illusions of the past - a journey that can only be guided by one’s own conscience.
Written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman imparts a fuller, richer understanding and appreciation of the late Harper Lee. Here is an unforgettable novel of wisdom, humanity, passion, humor, and effortless precision - a profoundly affecting work of art that is both wonderfully evocative of another era and relevant to our own times.
It not only confirms the enduring brilliance of To Kill a Mockingbird, but also serves as its essential companion, adding depth, context, and new meaning to an American classic.
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- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1920, in small-town America, the ubiquitous dry goods store was usually owned by Jews and often referred to as "the Jew store". That's how Stella Suberman's father's store, Bronson's Low-Priced Store, in Concordia, Tennessee, was known locally. The Bronsons were the first Jews to ever live in that tiny town of one main street, one bank, one drugstore, one picture show, one feed and seed, one hardware, one barber shop, one beauty parlor, one blacksmith, and many Christian churches.
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Wonderful
- By Susan simpson on 09-04-21
By: Stella Suberman
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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
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Welcome to the Monkey House
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: David Strathairn, Maria Tucci, Bill Irwin, and others
- Length: 11 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, what these superb stories share is Vonnegut's audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
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Classic Vonnegut
- By Michael Carrato on 08-17-06
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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Liberating Paris
- A Novel
- By: Linda Bloodworth Thomason
- Narrated by: Cynthia Darlow
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Woodrow McIlmore, the town's golden boy and local gynecologist, is married to his beautiful high school sweetheart, Milan, and seems by all appearances to be leading the perfect life with his two children and extended family and friends. But when Wood's daughter announces that she is smitten with a college classmate and intends to marry him, her parents are stunned.
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Deeply moving, a great listen
- By Cynthia on 11-27-05
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The Ponder Heart
- By: Eudora Welty
- Narrated by: Sally Darling
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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Originally published in The New Yorker in 1954, The Ponder Heart is easily Eudora Welty’s most comic novel, a lighthearted burlesque that rivals Caldwell’s Tobacco Road for capturing rural idioms, and the novels of Mark Twain for high farce.
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Great reader
- By Patricia B. on 03-12-17
By: Eudora Welty
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Vegas Rich
- Vegas, Book 1
- By: Fern Michaels
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With a heart full of dreams, Sallie Coleman leaves Texas and heads west determined to get as far from the squalor of her dirt poor beginnings. With its shifting sands, smoky saloons, and bingo palaces, Las Vegas seems like a paradise. A paradise where an extraordinary twist of fate makes Sallie the most powerful businesswoman in Nevada.
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Get this booK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 09-26-10
By: Fern Michaels
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Everything That Rises Must Converge
- By: Flannery O’Connor
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot, Karen White, Mark Bramhall, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.
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Pride goeth before the fall
- By Ryan on 08-14-13
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Going to Meet the Man
- By: James Baldwin
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 7 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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"There's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their heads above water.
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Punch in the gut
- By Rebecca on 05-08-17
By: James Baldwin
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Tar Baby
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Desiree Coleman
- Length: 11 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
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So good that I'm writing my first Audible review!
- By BL on 12-10-11
By: Toni Morrison
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The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove
- A Novel
- By: Susan Gregg Gilmore
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Bezellia Grove was born into the most prominent of Nashville families, but that didn’t stop her from having an alcoholic mother and a distant, adulterous father. Her nanny, Maizelle, and Nathaniel, the handyman, are the people who have taken care of her since she can remember. She considers them family, but her parents just consider them servants because they are Black. When Bezellia has a clandestine romance with Nathaniel's son, Whites and Blacks unite in fury at the young couple.
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light southern fiction
- By suzanne on 02-08-13
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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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Emma
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Austen wrote, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like' and thus introduces the handsome, clever, rich - and flawed, Emma Woodhouse. Emma is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage; nothing however delights her more than matchmaking her fellow residents of Highbury. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protegee Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.
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Background sonds RUINED this
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What listeners say about Go Set a Watchman
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mel
- 07-16-15
Another One Bites the Dust
Go Set a Watchman...we've waded through the obstacles of skepticism regarding whether or not Lee wanted this published, the multitude of speculations on the author's intentions and the publisher's machinations -- then debated whether or not we should read this...will it stand up to the highest of expectations. Because, there is no way to unread TKAM, and we WILL make comparisons, no matter how hard we try to evaluate this novel on its own merits. As with y'all...TKAM was/is/will remain a favorite.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. So Good-Bye Atticus...Pillar of Morality.
There was a book that we used to read to children where turning the pages one way it was a richly illustrated fairy tale about a dragon that lured kids with his beauty, power and promises into his world. Once captured, he imprisoned and slowly destroyed them and everything they loved. This was a metaphor for drugs, and when you turned the book around and flipped the pages the other way, it was the very real world of drug addiction that the book explained, each page a true life depiction corresponding to the child's version. GSAW reminded me of that book -- the adult side, where with just a slight tilting of the balance, the illusions of childhood, the innocence and hopefulness that believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Daddy as the hero, eventually give way to reality. GSAW is the flip side--the day you learned mom tucked the quarters under your pillow, the day you learned that comedian that seemed such a moral touchstone was a sexual predator -- the day you discovered that Atticus Finch thought the Ku Klux Klan was merely “a political organization”.
"Where have all the cowboys gone?" Watch out John Wayne....
The writing is at times that same prose that whisks you into the South and lets you languish there a while. I loved those parts and felt Lee's powerful talent. But there where sections more often that felt unpolished; they lacked the development more in line with Mockingbird. The story itself was a bit disorganized and needed somewhere for us to land, to catch up (Jem's dead...so what?). Adding to the jerky quality was the soapbox commentary that passed for conversation, and logic-head games moderated by characters that seemed created for that purpose because of the lack of foundation. Even after I reckoned myself with people not being who I thought they were, there were times, especially with Jean Louise, that I felt like the author wasn't sure either. It had glimmers of Lee's brilliance but not nearly the sincerity. Those are the complaints that I cannot squash knowing this is the work of Harper Lee, and trying to be as unbiased as I can without being schizophrenic. Those are the little glitches absent in her published works before, that have me wondering if Harper Lee truly intended for this to be published, and why it wasn't while her sister was her legal representation and caretaker...but that's just my head speaking out loud.
So, with our innocence smashed, and the shock of such a betrayal, we are left to judge whether or not we are disillusioned or enlightened. Whether or not that was Lee's grand plan we'll never know, and in some ways I'm selfishly saddened to have to watch another pillar crumble and blow away into the dust. But, after the blind assault on what I thought I knew, I found that what Lee had to say here may pack even a more powerful wallop than TKAM -- things I'm still thinking about. Had it been more structurally sound, I think Lee could have had a novel that at least, rubbed shoulders with its predecessor.
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70 people found this helpful
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- msme12
- 07-17-15
Finally the characters of TKAMB have some dimension and are no longer a "nice" story
If you're looking for an easy and casual story to listen to, turn around now. This book is deep but only if you go there with it. Otherwise, you will only take away the superficial feelings of Scout throughout the book. There is no clear right and wrong character in the book. The flashbacks all have purpose and there are many hardcore subjects addressed in this novel from feminism, racism, complex family dynamics, politics, religion and social hierarchy for all walks of life. Jean Louise's 26 year old self thinks she has the whole world especially her little home town figured out based off of the the things that she learned as a child and made a terrible assumption that things will always stay the same. The only thing that is constant in life is change and she is the one who ends up noticing it all in a matter of days and it rocks her world. I felt so many emotions while listening to this book and Reese Witherspoon did an amazing job delivering it. Especially Atticus' and Uncle Jack's demeanor. I can see why it was shelved so many decades ago by Ms Lee herself. Harper Lee was too progressive for her own good. Amazing books. Each one has their own integrity with or without each other. I'll listen or read them both again for sure.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Jean
- 07-22-15
Compelling
I was in conflict as to read this book or not. My curiosity got the better of me so I read it. I decided to approach the book as the draft for “To Kill a Mockingbird”. In many ways “Go Set a Watchman” has a true ring of a small southern town of the 1950s and the civil rights movement beginning. I am a firm believer that one should judge people and situations by the time they live in, not by our current values; I try to adhere to this whether I am reading a history book, a historical novel or just a novel.
The raw material of the two books is the same, though what Lee does with that material in either book is drastically different. “Go Set a Watchman” shows the conflict of a young woman looking at a small southern town during the period of civil rights era after living in New York City. In “To Kill a Mockingbird” the time period is earlier when the young woman was a little girl.
Lee’s writing is in good form, there is some phrasing that would have been cleared up if the manuscript had been allowed the normal editing process. I found it interesting how the original editor worked with Lee and took this draft and helped her create the award winning book “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As an avid reader I am always trying to figure out the process the author goes through in creating a book. Reese Witherspoon did an excellent job narrating the book.
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- Bonnie E
- 07-15-15
Definitely must read again.
Things aren't always what we wish them to be. Growing up often means losing our heroes or at least seeing them through new eyes.
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- Denise
- 07-15-15
Bravo!!!
A must for Mockingbird fans! Reese Witherspoon was brilliant. "There is no more beautiful sound than an educated southern woman"--Winston Churchill
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- andrea
- 07-24-15
Loved it!
Once again Scout made me weep!
I loved the story, simple yet so full of wisdom. Amazing performance by Reese Witherspoon. Ended to soon!
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- Laurie Irwin-Pinkley
- 08-03-15
Wow!
Enjoyed listening to this book. Witherspoon did an excellent narration. A really great story about coming of age in the American south...glad I re-read To Kill A Mockingbird before I read/listened to this....even though this was written first, it was nice to have the characters history....they complement each other well.
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- rdunnick
- 07-25-15
Well Worth The wait!
Harpers Lee' "mockingbird" is my favorite book, so I've been so hungry to read anything else that she had written. This story was compelling, familiar and unexpected.... I've just finished and I'm going to start all over again right this moment.
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- Noreen
- 07-29-15
Go Set A Watchman
Would you listen to Go Set a Watchman again? Why?
Again and again! Brilliantly written, funny, sad, bittersweet, full of emotion, and I want to be a fly on the wall in their living rooms, cafes and offices again. I loved every scene and conversation, and want to go back with notes and write down the timeless themes captured in this book.
What did you like best about this story?
The fantastic dialog.
What does Reese Witherspoon bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?
Her emotional connection with every character.
Who was the most memorable character of Go Set a Watchman and why?
Jean Louise (Scout). It is her story of her change and growth.
Any additional comments?
The comments I have heard before reading the book, that Atticus is a racist, is not the heart of the story. Racism is certainly a major theme in the book, but the father-daughter/parent-child conflict is the heart. Children's worship of their parents and then finding they have feet of clay, is Jean Louise's major emotional battle.
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- Ella
- 07-26-15
Another masterpiece by Harper Lee
A must read for everyone. Perfect choice for book club and discussion. Exquisite and profound.
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