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Grand Union
- Stories
- Narrated by: Zadie Smith, Doc Brown
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
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Publisher's summary
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal!
A dazzling collection of short fiction
Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving 11 completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.
Nothing is off limits, and everything - when captured by Smith’s brilliant gaze - feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.
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Critic reviews
"Zadie Smith, who narrates the first and last of the 19 stories in her collection, vividly explores people's complex lives.... Smith's low pitch and English accent make this work sound calm and literary - as if she is narrating to a familiar audience. Doc Brown's narration of the other 17 stories is an entertaining ebb and flow of energy. He employs different accents and plays with pitch.... Brown's enjoyable narration adds to Smith's well-established reputation as a writer." (AudioFile Magazine)
"Grand Union is an unusual creature, combining all the experimental exuberance of a writer discovering a form with the technical prowess of one at the height of her abilities. The result is exhilarating.... Smith’s voracious intellect is on full display. With vitality and wit, she shuttles between the philosophical universal and the intensely local - a movement formally realized in stories like 'Two Men Arrive in a Village' - between the world and the self.... It is a delight to watch Smith play." (San Francisco Chronicle)
"[Grand Union] contains some of Smith’s most vibrant, original fiction, the kind of writing she’ll surely be known for. Some of these stories provide hints that everything we’ve seen from her so far will one day be considered her 'early work,' that what lies ahead is less charted territory, wilder and less predictable." (Rebecca Makkai, The New York Times Book Review)
"An enchanting collection that examines the complexity of contemporary life. This book of short stories, the author’s first, refuses to define itself as any one thing. Instead, Smith allows each story to take on a tone, genre and life of its own.... This wild ride that Smith takes readers on is a delight to experience. Her characters are vivid and unique, as are her observations about the state of the world." (Associated Press)
Featured Article: It Was the Best of Scribes—The Best British Authors
With its esteemed history and bold contemporary scene, Britain lays claim to some of the most exciting literature in audio. With the hundreds of incredible British writers throughout the centuries, a person could devote their whole literary life solely to British authors and still never run out of amazing things to listen to. Whether you're an avid Anglophile or just want to discover the best English novelists for yourself, here’s a list of the best for you to choose from!
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Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
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Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
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The Promise
- By: Damon Galgut
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.
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Excellent novel
- By ALG on 11-09-21
By: Damon Galgut
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Lady Oracle
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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From fat girl to thin, from red hair to mud brown, from London to Toronto, from Polish count to radical husband - Joan Foster is utterly confused by her life of multiple identities. She decides to escape to an Italian hill town to take stock of her life. But first, she must organize her own death.
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A Feminist Romp
- By annkpowers on 07-02-22
By: Margaret Atwood
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What Storm, What Thunder
- By: Myriam J.A. Chancy
- Narrated by: Ella Turenne
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
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The Earth had buckled, and, in that movement, all that was not in its place fell upon the Earth’s children, upon the blameless as well as the guilty, without discrimination. At the end of a long sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. Award-winning author Myriam J. A. Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster
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We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
- By AuthorAnnaBella on 03-15-22
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Call Down the Hawk (The Dreamer Trilogy, Book 1)
- By: Maggie Stiefvater
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 13 hrs and 45 mins
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Performance
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Story
Ronan Lynch is a dreamer. He can pull both curiosities and catastrophes out of his dreams and into his compromised reality. Jordan Hennessy is a thief. The closer she comes to the dream object she is after, the more inextricably she becomes tied to it. Carmen Farooq-Lane is a hunter. Her brother was a dreamer...and a killer. She has seen what dreaming can do to a person. And she has seen the damage that dreamers can do. But that is nothing compared to the destruction that is about to be unleashed....
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Unlistenable
- By Nathan Parker on 11-24-19
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Autumn
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Melody Grove
- Length: 5 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Incredible use of language
- By Mary on 03-06-17
By: Ali Smith
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Sweet Sorrow
- The Long-Awaited New Novel from the Best-Selling Author of One Day
- By: David Nicholls
- Narrated by: Rory Kinnear
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
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From the best-selling author of One Day comes a bittersweet and brilliantly funny coming-of-age tale about the heart-stopping thrill of first love - and how just one summer can forever change a life.
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A delight in every way!
- By Jennifer on 04-24-22
By: David Nicholls
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There may be truths on the side of life
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Mean Girls / Soap Opera, But Sans Fun
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It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper—and cousin by marriage—of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years. Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
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Very disappointing
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White Teeth
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At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them.
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4.68 stars....a modern classic
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Such a Fun Age
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Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young Black woman out late with a White child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
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This is embarrassing!
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Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, his business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them - all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the reinstatement of some kind of all-powerful, benevolent God-type figure, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of '40s movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.
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Maybe it's ...me? (But I don't think it's me.)
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By: Zadie Smith
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This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
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Somewhat Disappointed
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How to Love a Jamaican
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Tenderness and cruelty, loyalty and betrayal, ambition and regret - Alexia Arthurs navigates these tensions to extraordinary effect in her debut collection about Jamaican immigrants and their families back home. Sweeping from close-knit island communities to the streets of New York City and midwestern university towns, these 11 stories form a portrait of a nation, a people, and a way of life.
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Wha gwaan?!
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The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves.
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His Tumulus of Stunning Sirenic Stories
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
- By: Raymond Carver
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- Unabridged
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In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Raymond Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one's way through the dark.
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Great stories, awful performance
- By Victor Capo on 02-14-19
By: Raymond Carver
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What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
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- Unabridged
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A dazzlingly accomplished debut collection explores the ties that bind parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and friends to one another and to the places they call home. In “Who Will Greet You at Home”, a National Magazine Award finalist for The New Yorker, a woman desperate for a child weaves one out of hair, with unsettling results. In “Wild”, a disastrous night out shifts a teenager and her Nigerian cousin onto uneasy common ground. In "The Future Looks Good", three generations of women are haunted by the ghosts of war.
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Hard to follow as an audiobook
- By JC on 07-02-18
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The Vanishing Half
- A GMA Book Club Pick (A Novel)
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- Unabridged
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Story
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern Black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: Their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for White, and her White husband knows nothing of her past.
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Soap opera material
- By Sheila S on 06-06-20
By: Brit Bennett
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The Cliffs: Reese's Book Club
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On a secluded bluff overlooking the ocean sits a Victorian house, lavender with gingerbread trim, a home that contains a century’s worth of secrets. By the time Jane Flanagan discovers the house as a teenager, it has long been abandoned. The place is an irresistible mystery to Jane. There are still clothes in the closets, marbles rolling across the floors, and dishes in the cupboards, even though no one has set foot there in decades. The house becomes a hideaway for Jane, a place to escape her volatile mother.
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Reese Witherspoon choice
- By L. T. Gerhardt on 07-06-24
What listeners say about Grand Union
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Fran Bull Fitzgerald
- 07-13-22
brilliant short stories
I loved the vignettes, loved the readers. Brilliant writing, of course.
Smith's such a mind.
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- Andre
- 11-11-19
In Defense of Zadie Smith
The best decision I made in relation to the audiobook of Zadie Smith's "Grand Union: Stories" was to not listen to the naysayers who gave it negative reviews. My first introduction to Smith's writings came not from her novels, but from her 2019 essay "In Defense of Fiction" published in a popular literary magazine. I not only read her spirited defense of fiction, but I was spared developing a prejudice of only knowing of her writing through her novels. Furthermore, I saw her put her defense of fiction into practice in this collection of exquisite stories. There are many delights in this collection, among which are her superb sense of character and voice. She features a wide range of characters in transition between Asia, Africa, America, England, and the West Indies. Instead of the old adage of "write what you know," she wrote what she imagined, but there is enough truth in her stories to grip my imagination. "Big Week" features an Indian architect from Uganda in Boston. Listening in on the architect's conversation with a Boston cabbie was one of the many high points of this collection. Hearing all of these cultures clash and meld thrilled me. Smith is unpredictable. I do not know where she is going with her stories. I do not care. I enjoy spending time with her characters and listening to them, like in the flash fiction sequence "Mood" which features snapshots of New Yorkers and includes a hilarious conversation between Roberta and her parrot Preston. One of the keys to "Grand Union" is that you have to listen to the stories over and over again to get them, for them to deepen in you so you could appreciate their craft and nuance. In this hustle and bustle world, people often will not invest the time in sinking into a story. We want things fast, easy, comprehensible. "Grand Union" rebukes this trend in our culture. I've listened to some of the stories in her collection two or three times and I am still learning something new from them, being delighted and moved in unexpected ways, such as the poignant "For the King" or the contentious "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets." "Grand Union" is not only an outstanding collection of short stories, but a popular name for train stations. Reading her collection, I get a sense of passengers from various backgrounds meeting each other in surprising combinations, which often happens at train stations. People are moving together for a few moments only to part and never see each other again. I enjoyed listening to the conversations of people in transition. The whole point is not the destination, but how we are connected to one another.
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7 people found this helpful
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- DJ
- 01-03-20
It Could Be a 3.5...
I gave this an overall three stars, though arguably, if such a rating were available, I'd have called it 3.5, with slight extra points for the stories, and a bit of a minus for the presentation. This was, I have to say, the least favorite of the books I have read by Zadie Smith. Let me add a caveat that most of the stories I liked most I had read previously, in the New Yorker and elsewhere, but most of the new material I wasn't especially fond of. I find Smith to be at her best when she is in her wry realist mode. I found the semi-sci-fi tenor of some of the stories to be frankly distracting. Further, the narration, by Doc Brown, was fine for the stories set in England, but really fell down on the stories set in the US, with frequent mispronunciations o flocations and colloquialisms that were jarring to the American ear.
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- D. K. Coe
- 10-14-19
Not for me
Heard good things on NPR, but the audio book just didn’t hold my attention. I struggled to follow the story and the jumps between characters. Doc Brown’s performance was good and there were times I was pulled in to the story. I may enjoy this more if I read it with my eyes instead of my ears.
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- True Review
- 10-12-19
Sour and depressing
I see the author's ability to portray life through metaphor and visual imagery but the topics are sour and depressing. I barely made it through the first chapter. If I want to know about reality of animal cruelty I just have to walk out my door to witness the
wild life being decimated in my area. I purchased this after the NY times highly recommened but it's just not my reading style.
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5 people found this helpful